Our long national sunscreen nightmare is almost over

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On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films himself in the ocean while describing how you can naturally build up a “solar callus” or sun tolerance to getting burned. (You can’t.) In another, a young woman confidently states that eating healthy foods full of polyphenols and other antioxidants will help make your body more resilient to sunburn. (Antioxidants help with free radical damage, sure, but cannot replace sunscreen.) She also casts sunscreens with “hard-to-pronounce chemicals” as the real enemy, and promotes “all-natural” mineral sunscreens and… beef tallow. (Sadly, yes, the grifters are out here starting to formulate sunscreens with beef tallow despite the horde of dermatologists screaming about how there’s no scientific evidence.) Often, anti-sunscreen influencers argue that our ancestors never worried about sun protection (they did) and how could something natural be bad for you? (The natural sun causes sunburns and skin cancer.)

Hating sunscreen has strangely caught on, but hopefully, that’s about to change.

I’m a different sort of sunscreen evangelist. Last week at WWDC, I found myself chasing down my pastier peers as the sun crept over Apple Park. Did you put on sunscreen? If anyone said no — and many did — I’d tsk and reach into my bag for a tube of Round Lab Birch Juice Moisturizing Sun Cream. I’d demand they hold out three fingers and I’d squeeze out three identical lines of Korea’s finest SPF technology onto their hands. Some were grateful. Most winced, expecting something greasy, hard to rub in, and likely to sting their eyes.

All were shocked when this sunscreen was none of those things.

That’s because for the past 26 years, American sunscreen has been terrible compared to sunscreens available in the rest of the world. For over two decades, we’ve been suffering with white casts, sticky textures, and that weird chemical-y smell, begrudgingly rubbing in minuscule amounts that likely fell short of offering the labeled SPF protection. (You need a quarter teaspoon for your face alone!) Meanwhile, Asia, Australia, and Europe have had elegant formulations that not only feel better to wear, but are also more effective at protecting skin. It’s led to Americans dodging sunscreen like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix, even though skin cancer is the most common cancer in the US.

But finally there’s good news. Last week, the FDA approved a new chemical sunscreen filter for the first time since 1999. Meaning, at long last, better sunscreens are on the way.

The new filter is bemotrizinol, also known as Tinosorb S or BEMT. What makes it exciting to cosmetic chemists in the US is it offers broad-spectrum protection against both UVA and UVB rays, is much more photostable, can help stabilize other sunscreen filters, and isn’t as likely to be absorbed into the bloodstream because it’s a larger molecule. That’s major for several reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that it could help defang the anti-sunscreen movement.

Anti-sunscreen fears flared up in 2019 and 2021 after the FDA tweaked sunscreen regulations and requested more safety data for some chemical sunscreen filters. Researchers had found that older chemical filters were absorbed into the bloodstream. Meanwhile, mineral sunscreens like zinc and titanium dioxide were deemed GRASE — or generally recognized as safe and effective. (For the record, BEMT has also been deemed GRASE.)

That reinforced the notion that mineral sunscreens are superior to chemical ones, which are “bad for your health.” The reality is the FDA was simply asking for more data. Mineral and chemical sunscreens largely protect your skin in the same way — by absorbing UV rays and using a chemical reaction to dissipate them into heat. The difference is mineral sunscreens also reflect a small portion of UV rays and sit atop your skin, while chemical filters are absorbed.

Anti-sunscreen videos are actually a minority on social media. Researchers from the University of Alberta studied nearly 1,000 TikTok videos spanning the top five sunscreen-related hashtags; 87 percent promoted sunscreen use. The bad news is that the 6 percent of videos spewing misinformation — claims that sunscreen causes cancer, for example — received much higher rates of engagement.

That has consequences. Teens are purportedly flocking back to tanning beds and checking weather apps for the UV index — not to avoid excessive sun exposure, but to seek it out. A survey by the American Academy of Dermatology Association shows that about half of Americans scored a C or lower on sun safety knowledge, with a third of Gen Z scoring a D or an F. The survey also found that 29 percent of US adults believe a tan is fine so long as you don’t burn. It probably doesn’t help that Health Secretary RFK Jr. recently withdrew a proposed FDA rule that would’ve banned tanning beds for minors. That’s hardly surprising, given that Kennedy is a proponent of tanning and the MAHA movement believes there’s a public war on alternative therapies, such as “sunshine.”

But again, the truth is there’s no such thing as a “safe” tan — any tan is a sign that you’ve accumulated skin damage. That brings us back to why BEMT is a big freakin’ deal.

Firstly, BEMT is easier to formulate with, is more effective in lower concentrations, and is a hero ingredient in many international sunscreens. Conversely, US sunscreens have tended to underperform at protecting against UVA rays. That’s the type that penetrates more deeply into the skin, is responsible for tanning and signs of aging, and contributes to long-term skin cancer. UVB rays directly harm your skin through sunburns and can lead to the DNA mutations that cause skin cancer. A 2017 study found that out of 20 US sunscreens, only 11 passed Europe’s higher standards for UVA protection. Secondly, US sunscreens have typically relied on avobenzone for UVA protection. That filter is notoriously not photostable, meaning it degrades rapidly when exposed to sunlight. To achieve broad-spectrum protection, it had to be mixed with other filters, but the unfortunate result? Avobenzone also degraded the stability of those other filters.

You might wonder why the US would just do nothing if better options were widely available. A big part of that is because the US regulates sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug. Most other countries regulate it as a cosmetic. (Australia is an exception, but it has a much more streamlined process than the FDA.) That means any new sunscreen filter has to go through rigorous and extremely expensive testing. From a business perspective, many cosmetics companies decided the juice wasn’t worth the regulatory squeeze to redo a lot of expensive testing for a product already proven safe by other international regulators.

Optimizer readers will know that FDA clearance for wearables is an ordeal, and often why health tech from CES ends up as vaporware. And that’s just the clearance process for medical devices. The approval process for drugs is much, much more involved. DSM-Firmenich, a health and beauty multinational, originally applied to have BEMT approved in 2005, but it sat in FDA regulatory hell. Then, in 2020, the CARES Act helped streamline the over-the-counter approval process, and DSM-Firmenich was able to restart the process in late 2024. Over the course of this journey, the company footed a testing and development bill that is likely to top $20 million. On the one hand, it means BEMT is a heavily studied sunscreen filter. On the other, it’s taken 26 years and tens of millions of dollars when, again, there was ample research conducted over that time proving safety and efficacy.

Another side effect of the FDA’s laborious approvals process: It’s created a gray market for “the good stuff.”

One option is badgering friends traveling abroad to bring back superior sunscreens as souvenirs — which I do every year when family members visit Korea. But a grayer area is the export sites for international cosmetics. For a long time, authorities turned a blind eye to the various Korean, Japanese, and European brands selling their superior sunscreens on TikTok Shop and other retailers.

But in the last two years or so, the FDA and Customs and Border Protection have been cracking down on OTC sunscreen compliance under the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act. Sunscreen nerds began noticing their favorite products were disappearing. Popular brands like Beauty of Joseon and Round Lab had to reformulate worse versions of their products to sell in the US. Subreddit after subreddit was full of angry sunscreen lovers looking for ways to get the original formulations or figure out why their imported packages were suddenly seized at customs.

The FDA approving BEMT doesn’t immediately fix all this. For starters, we likely won’t see newer sunscreen formulations until August or September — after peak vacation times spent soaking up sun. Also, this is only one new filter. Korea, Japan, and Europe have access to around 34 filters, while the US now has access to 16. So while we’ll get better sunscreens here in the US, they still won’t be quite as advanced as the ones sold abroad. Even so, progress is progress. There’s hope that this will continue thanks to the recently passed SAFE Sunscreen Standards Act, which streamlines the filter approval process and requires the FDA to evaluate filters already used in other countries.

I say all this because summer is just around the corner. Don’t listen to the TikTok tanning propaganda! There’s only one more summer where you have to put up with crappy sunscreens, so use up your remaining bottles with gusto and verve! And maybe this time next year, I won’t have to chase tech journalists at I/O and WWDC, threatening them with tubes of Korean sunscreen.