Maggie Koerth-Baker goes into some detail on four things you (probably) don’t know about sunscreen:
Starting next year, sunscreen — and the way its marketed — will change. This is good news. The changes correct some rather glaring examples of consumer misinformation. And it’s also important news … at least, from the perspective of this redhead.
New Food and Drug Administration regulations mean that, by the summer of 2012, there will be no such thing as “waterproof” sunscreen. That’s because, frankly, there already wasn’t such a thing. A sunscreen might be more water resistant than a competitor. But you can’t assume that one application of the “waterproof” stuff will stay with you through hours of pool time. Next year, sunscreen bottles will be honest about that fact, and they’ll tell you how long you can expect water resistance to last.
The other big change: What the sunscreen protects you from. Under the new regulations, only broad-spectrum sunscreens — the kind that protect you from both the UVA and UVB wavelengths of solar radiation — with SPF values of 15 and higher, can claim to prevent skin cancer. Anything else must tell you that it’s just for preventing sunburn.
Update: And, for a bit of balance, openmarket.org points out that this is probably a solution in search of a problem:
Unfortunately, this good/bad assessment comes from the bureaucrats of the FDA and not actual consumers, who are the ones that make this subjective assessment every time they make a purchase. This new labeling rule is akin to a customer review, which then begs the question as to why the FDA has the right to express its opinion on every bottle of sunscreen while the average consumer does not? Is it because those at the FDA are ostensibly smarter and more in-tune about what is in our best interest than we lowly plebeians are? I’m sure they certainly think so.
Finally, the FDA ignores that many consumers are already adequately informed and realize (when they buy an SPF 4 sunscreen, for example) that their desired sunblock may not strongly protect them from UVA or UVB rays — who actually believes an SPF 4 provides real protection? Much like who honestly believes that smoking isn’t hazardous to health and relies on the FDA-mandated labels to make him/her aware of this misconception? Consumers already weed out the good products from the bad through company reputation, trial and error, word of mouth, etc. This new regulation only serves to discourage and worry those who already buy sunscreen that they value and increase its cost of production. The notion that we’d all be ignorant consumers incapable of acting in our own best interest without the benevolent patriarchy of the FDA is absurd.
