Five years ago, this summer the U.S Food and Drug Administration made what seemed like a simple request to sunscreen manufacturers: show us the safety data on the chemical ingredients in your products.
First approved for use in the 1970s, the original thinking was that a topical product wouldn’t be absorbed through the skin and into the bloodstream. A series of tests undertaken by FDA researchers in 2019 proved otherwise. The petrochemical sunscreen ingredients moved quickly through the skin, quickly exceeding what the FDA had determined to be safe levels.
“The fact that an ingredient is absorbed through the skin and into the body does not mean that the ingredient is unsafe,” write Janet Woodcock and Theresa Michele, respectively, directors of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, and its Division of Nonprescription Drug Products. “Rather this finding calls for further testing to determine the safety of that ingredient for repeated use.”
But instead of restricting the use of those products until they’re proven safe, the FDA simply revoked their GRASE – generally recognized as safe and effective – and allowed manufacturers to continue to make sunscreens with ingredients that have not been proven to be safe.
That’s unacceptable, says Autumn Blum, an award-winning cosmetic chemist who started Stream2Sea in 2015 to manufacture reef-safe sunscreen. “Yes, I can see some challenges in testing for the long-term issues like birth defects and cancer that the FDA is concerned about, but these are multinational corporations who sell billions of dollars’ worth of sunscreen every year. As far as I’m concerned, these ingredients should not be considered ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ We need to see safety data. “
Sunscreen manufacturers, through their trade group, appear to have stuck their heads in the sand about sunscreen safety though. “Sunscreens are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as over-the-counter (OTC) drugs,” their website says. “As such, they must be shown to be both safe and effective using the FDA testing methods.”
Again, Blum calls bull. “The FDA very clearly identifies petrochemical sunscreens including oxybenzone, octinoxate, octisalate, octocrylene and avobenzone as not GRASE,” she said. “They’re still waiting for the safety data they requested in 2019.”
Having clear answers to those questions is more important now than ever before, Blum adds. “When these petrochemicals were first approved 50 years ago, people used them occasionally for a trip to the beach or the pool. Now they’re used daily, beginning at a very young age so a child born today could theoretically be exposed to 70+ years of daily sunscreen with insufficient safety data.”