European sunscreens are safer than American (2024) | Hacker News Reader

European sunscreens are safer than American (2024)

ms.now

140 pointsqsi92 comments

> Not at all. In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.

Are they less safe, or _may_ they be less safe? The distinction is important, and I'm wary of overexcited editors "upgrading" titles for clicks.

(This is a comment on the veracity of the title claim only - I'm British, I have no skin in this game)

> I have no skin in this game

You literally have if you use sunscreen. ;)

He just said he’s British

They didn't say they had never traveled south though

It's day light, not sun light. You can easily burn on a cloudy day.

Britain conforms with EU regulations on sunscreen, as with almost everything else.

Maybe one day they will join the union

This article never actually says which chemicals are being used in these sunscreens that are supposedly better/safer, but basically there are only two groups of effective active ingredients for sunscreen: zinc or titanium oxide (minerals) or benzene/petroleum derivatives. The problem with the latter is they absorb through the skin and are carcinogenic, although the research shows they're better than mineral-based sunscreen at blocking UV across a wider spectrum and therefore the offset in skin cancer rate is more than the cancer risk from absorption. Meanwhile good old zinc oxide has basically no downsides except that it doesn't look pretty and you have to reapply it often if you're swimming or sweating, and if you reapply often enough it's nearly as effective as benzene-based sunscreens.

The "better" EU sunscreens and also those in Korean/Japanese products, in my experience are using benzene derived chemicals. I'll stick to zinc oxide, thanks.

Wrong there are plenty of other ingredients. In fact one of those ingredients that is permitted in EU and not US is ecamsule. It is quite nice, it absorbs the UV photons by switching confirmation (different isomere) rather than being oxidised into ROS/free radicals as many other ingredients do.

Ecamsule is interesting but unfortunately only blocks a very narrow wavelength of UVA, which means it has to be mixed with other chemicals which are usually the benzene derivatives I mention. It's also water-soluble so very difficult to make it waterproof.

Materials science is hard, and it's even harder when it comes to things we put in and on our bodies, which is why we shouldn't sensationalize the benefits of new chemicals without acknowledging their downsides, especially when we have found something that works exceptionally well, is cheap, and is merely cosmetically challenging (zinc oxide).

Btw titanium dioxide is now a suspected carcinogenic. It is illegal in food in the EU now.

Yes, titanium and aluminum were commonly used in skincare products like sunscreen and deodorant and even in toothpaste (and still are in the US), but should be avoided. That's part of why I use zinc oxide and not titanium oxide. Zinc oxide is not a carcinogen.

I hope you didn't type that comment using a cell phone, because IARC also suspects that to be carcinogenic.

> good old zinc oxide has basically no downsides except that it doesn't look pretty

Tinted sunscreens solve this problem.

Didn't the FDA clear new ingredients this week? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/well/fda-sunscreen-bemotr...

OP's article is from 2024, according to the date on it

I think a lot of us HN-types are people who like to post riddles like this instead of news about what actually happened.

Does that make them safer?

If sunscreen is supposed to provide specific health benefits, namely to reduce cancer risk, then it is a drug, not a cosmetic. Regulations should ensure it provides the intended effect without undue harm. Cosmetics are given more leeway because they are, in principle, neutral from a medical perspective. Why would you want to treat a cancer related product like that? Saving upfront time and money, at the risk of having to spend a lot more time and money later in healthcare, is not a good reason. If anything, we might head the opposite direction. Some people think we should start regulating dietary supplements as drugs rather than food.

FDA does regulate cosmetics components, and FTC regulates what claims they can make. It’s hard to make a binary decision that one thing is a drug and something else isn’t. You can appreciate there is a spectrum of side effects with moisturizer and sunblock on one end, supplements in the middle, and chemotherapy drugs on the other end.

Personally, I think that Americans simply don’t treat skin cancer as seriously as they should, and so the market has not provided more choices.

Sure, but that doesn’t excuse the FDA from slow-rolling/blocking new ingredients that should be better. As noted in the article, the sunscreens available here would not pass muster in the EU despite supposedly less stringent rules.

I've no opinion whatsoever on the topic, but why can't economists refrain from writing opinion pieces in newspaper about topics they have no qualification on?

I'm sure there's enough dermatologists and pharmaceutical engineers to give their informed opinion on such a topic, instead of having economists speaking as everythingologists on every damn subject…

(I know why they do that, the author is merely a polical activist, but I wish editors would just close the door to such pieces).

Frankly, the field of dermatology is so captured by corporations that my confidence is hardly raised when I see a degree in that field.

Is there a term for regulatory capture but for academia? Like "academic capture"?

I'd say dermatology, nutrition/dietetics, and phytopathology are 3 of the worst fields in this regard. I don't think we're fully over the sugar lobby's stranglehold on relevant science and I think the glyphosate lobby's hold is even stronger than that was. How many times are we gonna go through these crises and not reform the way we do and fund science?

Sidenote: this phenomenon is known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Maybe more relevant is "Engineer syndrome" — the tendency of technically minded individuals to assume that their expertise in one area makes them an authority on everything

See also Nobel Disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

I think the problem overall is just that we live in a society that conditions us to get validation from the size of our paychecks. Software engineers get a fat paycheck and think "well I must be really smart. Why else would society compensate me like this?". I'm sure it's a problem in all sorts of highly-paid fields. I'm always shocked by how many physicians I see write massively ambitious, terribly researched generalizations (see Jared Diamond and the experts in relevant fields that will spend the rest of their lives dispelling myths he spread)

Poking around on Google, the scientific consensus seems to be that the EU or Asian sunscreens are in fact better. I haven’t found anything to the contrary.

(2024)

More recently:

FDA Expands Sunscreen Options for the First Time in 20 Years to Add Bemotrizinol

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-expa...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466007)

From what I read in the article, American sunscreen has more stringent regulation because it is qualified as drugs, which has higher standards, thus making American sunscreen safer (but less efficient).

Yeah, the article is contradiction with itself. US has higher standards, restricting what can be sold but then also states, "In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection."

So which is it?

Both? I mean both can be true.

European sunscreens are less regulated than American sunscreens and are thus safer because they can draw from a wider array of ingredients.

American food is less regulated than European food and is thus less safe because it can draw from a wider array of ingredients.

Wait.

Sunscreen can be unsafe in that the ingredients poison you. Or it can be unsafe in that it fails to screen the sun's harmful UV. More ingredients to choose from means that it can be safer at screening UV. But...

Imagine if car regulations specified what can be in a car.

"You want seatbelts, airbags, ABS? Bureaucracy says not allowed! There's a lengthy review process!"

The correct statement in the US would be: You want seatbelts, airbags, ABS? You have to pay a $1000 monthly fee.

Sorry, I couldn't resist

The FDA did (3 days ago!) finally approve a new ingredient: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-expa...

My personal hot take is that we should all be using zinc (or titanium) oxide sunscreen which AFAICT maxes out both effectiveness and chemical safety. (And is the best for the fish?) Interestingly, these are the only ingredients that the FDA currently deems both safe and effective.

My wife is black and has sensitive skin. She once tried zinc oxide sunscreen. If one wants to be protected from the sun while cosplaying as purple monster, it's a great choice.

I'm light-skin and look like a ghost with Blue Lizard. I can't imagine how ridiculous it must look on dark skin.

This truly is the biggest drawbacks. It's almost impossible to make zinc sunscreen see-through. One technique is to micronize the zinc but this comes with its own set of risks including skin penetration and environmental risks that micronized zinc can pose to aquatic life.

I think the only solution is to embrace it. There isn't really a 100% safe sunscreen that is also invisible

Sunscreens that use zinc/titanium dioxide as active ingredients are often so unpleasant to use that people don't apply enough of them or refuse to use them. The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.

SPF boosters: https://labmuffin.com/100-mineral-sunscreens-using-unregulat...

The coral-safe sunscreen claims don't have a lot of evidence behind them:

https://labmuffin.com/is-your-sunscreen-killing-coral-the-sc...

> The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.

Interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I had a little trouble understanding what the link was saying at first, but it seems to (correctly) state that many "mineral" sunscreens contain active chemical ingredients like butyloctyl salicylate. (And they're sometimes labeled as non-active ingredients?)

the EWG's sunscreen reviews are quite in depth fwiw. They even assess the "data availability" of each ingredient

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/best-sunscreens/best-beach-spo...

But they didn't do any actual testing? It's just some score based on ingredients and advertised SPF?

It's a compilation of the science around every ingredient. And the most in-depth one at that

Titanium dioxide is now an IARC 2B suspected carcinogen.

IARC is not a regulatory body, and its categories do not address disease risk.

Maybe FDA got this right. I bet you dollars to donuts that putting TiO2 on your skin reduces the risk of cancer.

The FDA... Which doesn't do it's own studies and trusts the study results of the manufacturers who want to sell their products?

Why would FDA do its own studies? It's a regulatory body. (Do you know what NIH does?)

"My smoke alarm is no good because it never turned off my stove."

I think the idea of listening to the FDA's untested opinions on what is effective and safe need to be carefully reviewed.

Here's a simple approach to UV A,B and High Intensity Blue light protection that is safe for the wearer and for downstream ecosystem organisms from the microbiotic to environmental scale. It is not the kind of cream that 'vanishes' after application, nor is it readily available at the local bodega, but it will keep you from catching solar melanoma and carcinoma.

Step one - long sleeved shirt, or t-shirt and sleeves with a high effective SPF factor - they call these 'rash guards' and the ones made from petrochemical polymers require proper recycling when you are done with them to keep them from degrading into microparticulate plastics that are harmful so depending on the availability of such recycling programs to the wearer, selection may require choosing natural fibre of biopolymer compostable materials.

Step two - revist the stone age resources for this task:

Red or yellow Ochre is an effective UVA, UVB, and HIB blocker in sufficient thickness - it does have a 'war paint' look if unmixed, but if your focus is on avoiding skin cancer over conforming to current fashion, so what.

40% Distilled Water and Aloe Vera Gel (Evaporative Base) - spreadability and skin soothing 15% Cosmetic Kaolin Clay (Structural Base) - fine clay to provide smoothness and full, non-cracking coverage 15% Superfine Matcha Powder (Polyphenol/Film Former) - antioxidant to prevent free radicals formed by the UV from causing cellular damage: this also can be used in combination with choice of red+yellow ochres to fine tune the color 15% Precipitated Calcium Carbonate (Light Scattering) - aid the internal light scattering process to amplify the effectiveness of the ochre powders 10% Cosmetic-Grade Yellow/Red Ochre (UV Absorber) - these have been used since the stone age and are still in use, even by wild animals such as elephants, as mud based sunscreen. Effective, non-toxic, iron oxide particulates, which if acquired from a reputable cosmetic supplier have been tested and are free from heavy metal compounds. 4.6% Vegetable Glycerin (Humectant & Plasticizer) - improve the feel of the blend, aid in skin conditioning and wearability 0.2% AMTicide Coconut - natural antifungal to help this blend not "grow nastiness" 0.2% Leucidal Liquid - natural radish ferment (kimchi family) anti-bacterial: not a bacteriocide but bacteriostatic.

this blend can be adjusted with sodium alginate in the aloe vera fraction for personal preference.

And this only needs to be worn on the parts of one not covered by clothing or shaded under a wide brimmed hat.

But this all flies in the face of modern "fashion" - or it will, until some empty headed, emotionless stick figure poses for a fashion show to promote for a fee. And then it might become a 'must have' look.

If your goal is to not burn while pursuing outdoor work or play in intense UV environments, be that in hot or cold locations - high altitude can be stupid powerful UV exposure, you can make this recipe yourself and 'caveman safety' to the rescue.

Stay safe

> A peer-approval system would work both ways. Europe would also take into account FDA decisions

This doesn't seem like a given at all. Just because the FDA accepts EMA approvals wouldn't mean the EMA would accept FDA ones and as a European, I wouldn't want it to.

I have a lot more trust in the EMA than the FDA.

Peer approval schemes are usually implemented as trade efficiency measures. A one sided peer approval would make it easier to import, while not making it easier to export, causing a delta trade deficit.

That how you end up with chlorinated chicken you'd never knowingly eat.

Obviously any authority that takes its job seriously makes decisions based on facts and not blind trust.

Why is a trade deficit something to worry about? After all, my local grocery store buys nothing from me, but we both benefit from the exchange of goods and currency.

Furthermore, even if the trade deficit was something to worry about, why should the food and drug safety bureaucracies be the ones to determine that kind of economic policy?

That's a problem for the country with insufficient approval schemes to deal with, especially if they're also doing more work out of spite.

For a country which has a sufficient approval scheme, they lose little by choosing not to trusting an insufficient approval scheme.

This isn't about trade efficiency though, it's about bypassing an inefficient bureaucracy by allowing for approval by a more efficient one as an option.

We have no intention of dropping our standards to US ones, but they are welcome to follow our lead. (Or don't! It's up to you, just don't make it our problem!)

The FDA’s big claim to fame is not approving thalidomide when European regulators did, preventing a bunch of birth defects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

This was also an entire lifetime ago.

The modern FDA's big claim to fame is having the previous head of it forced out, then nearly immediately approving controversial fruit-flavored vape products at the behest of a POTUS who both owns stock in Altria/Philip Morris and receives millions in Super PAC money from the tobacco industry.

Past performance is perhaps not indicative of future results.

3 years ago I was in pharma in Europe. Back then (a political lifetime ago), the FDA had an excellent reputation and was considered a kind of gold standard.

Get your new drug approved by the FDA, and ~50+ countries would follow more or less on autopilot.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because as far as I know, they really _were_ that good.

Theoretically speaking, if the standards are broadly aligned, there is something to be said about reducing duplicative efforts to regulate. The EMA has partnerships with other regulatory agencies already. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/partners-networks/international...

Like, you don't need two agencies to test that the side effect of a medicine is nausea.

Japanese ones are also much better. I like Anessa Milk, it also doesn't stain as bad as some others.

Did anyone feel that food in Europe and Japan are fresher and more safe? Many of my friends anecdotally felt that they felt better after eating in Japan or Europe than in the US.

Can't the free market just make this problem go away?

You seem to be unaware of the asymmetry of information and competence. This is why consumer protection exists.

Existed*

What specific consumer protections are you referencing?

The FDA's purpose is protection of the public health. Drug approval would be one specific example. The SCCS (EU) evaluating UV filter safety is another.

Consider the potential for economic growth in private testing services. It's called job creation!

It could, but everybody got an orange tan afterwards.

If it's straightforward to approve new cosmetics, REACH, Cosmetic Products Regulation 1223/2009 updated no latter than this year in regulation 2026/78, ISO 22716 and whatnot still apply

You can find lists of ingredients banned in cosmetics in the EU, or across EVERY industry in general

Perfume manufacturers are the only ones who get away with virtually everything as they don't have to declare their ingredients (but "perfumes" are also an ingredient in a bunch of cosmetics, so here is the loophole as Europe always has loopholes)

Oh yeah, the free market is great at burying problems so consumers remain in the dark.

It already has. That is why you are reading this right now.

Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US

>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.

You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.

If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.

The flipside of this is that companies put dangerous chemicals into food, cookware, etc. Not convinced things would be better on net.

Except you can check the differences easily.

China doesn't have the same strict regulations, and yet when we compare life expectancy the difference isn't particularly big.

Thought terminating cliches like "Better safe than sorry" simply don't stand up to scrutiny once you actually check the numbers.

No, eating brasilian beef isn't going to kill you, and stopping imports from there is going to do a whole lot more to make you poorer than it will help your health. Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.

Life expectancy and quality of life are very different things.

Lol.

There are so many confounding variables and long-delay influences, it’s nearly impossible to compare.

Prior generation Chinese tended to eat much less than any generation Americans, which has a proven positive effect on longevity.

Older generation Chinese also tended to (might still?) smoke like chimneys, which has a proven negative effect on longevity.

Older generation Chinese also lived through some crazy ‘population bottleneck’ events like the Great Leap Forward, which can cause very odd one time and unpredictable long term effects on longevity.

China started and enforced their one child policy early on, which has very weird population distribution effects, which will also have weird influences on longevity for everyone (due to excess or lacking societal support, etc).

They have also (relatively recently) been exposed to a wide variety of industrial chemicals, artificial fertilizers and pollutants.

Americans have had rapidly shifting food sources, pervasive but changing exposure to pesticides and artificial fertilizers, a massive shift from rural to urban to sedentary knowledge work, and widely shifting stress factors across a wide variety of areas. And a rather unique ability to spend massive amounts of time in commutes and automobiles.

This is also offset in time; and quantitatively different than Chinese have experienced.

> Except you can check the differences easily

Huh? No you can't. Without regulation or oversight, companies will simply lie about what's in their product.

The libertarian vision really handwaves the practical reality of "I'll simply do a gas spectrum analysis on every single bite of food I put into my body. Easy!"

> Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.

OK, before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and Federal Meat Inspection Act, food was frequently adulterated with e.g. formaldehyde in milk, borax in meat, copper salts in canned vegetables, and chalk/plaster in flour or milk.

Before the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, kids candy was dyed with toxic coal-tar. And on top of that was frequently contaminated with arsenic, lead, and mercury.

So please explain to all of us how taking a walk is going to save us from these issues.

> Except you can check the differences easily.

Have you forgotten the origins of these laws? Around the turn of the 20th century, it was muckraker journalists that alerted the public to the deceptive and unsafe practices that food and drug companies were using at the time. People didn't know -- that's, eh, how deception works.

...but then the other flip side is the government does things that result in contamination, dangerous chemicals in food, cookware, people dying, whatever.

You can't be "not convinced" that things would be better - "we" have a free market and that market produced sunscreen in the first place, without which we would have worse health outcomes. There's nothing to imagine - it happened. Things are better for us.

Not all things the free market produced actually have resulted in better health outcomes than if they had been disallowed (many result in the opposite, in fact) and certainly not better economic outcomes for the people who bought and used them. Regulation, as always, is a balancing act between enabling those who would do good and stymieing those (who with the best of intentions or outright sociopathy) would do harm.

So yes I remain unconvinced. Free market maximalists tend to highlight their favorite part of the story while ignoring history.

Regulation has not always resulted in better health outcomes than if the product had otherwise been regulated either. We don't need to set up this false dichotomy between markets and regulation and then bash markets over the head with the negatives aspects while ignoring negatives outcomes as a result of government action which you seem to be insinuating.

So to remain unconvinced doesn't make sense here. Though I guess I can just say I'm unconvinced of government regulations because why not? Same line of reasoning that you're using here.

Sounds like we just agree then. Regulations are necessary and should be tuned, and the Free Market can operate within those regulations, the best of all worlds is where these things work together.

Sure but then I'm not sure why you disagreed with the OP? I don't think they said anything different than what I've written.

> If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.

Note that I'm not even explicitly disagreeing with OP, you interpreted my "flipside" as a disagreement. It's undeniable that removing regulations in cancer treatments will be "impactful". Possibly even it will have positive impact. But I am unconvinced that this would be a wise pattern to adopt more broadly.

The original does not read to me as a call for tweaking regulations, it reads like an anti-regulation Boogeyman post. Forgive me for possibly over indexing on patterns I've observed from HNers making this type of comment.

They are of course free at any time to come in and declare that my characterization is unfair, at which my point about the flipside is still completely valid.

Oh, I didn't read it that way at all which is why I interpreted your flip side comment as I did. You seemed to be defending regulation for no good reason in that context where the OP was pointing out how regulation seemed to (and I have done no research on this so I don't know) be holding the United States back, and then pointed out areas where we also have in their opinion regulations that are too strict.

calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis

Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese. We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards

I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here

regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall

>calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis

I didn't say it was a free market. i said it was a freer market in this particular instance, as shown by this article.

More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.

This isn't really the issue, most of the cost of reviewing new drug applications is covered by user fees. And most of the cost and time required for getting a drug approved is in the clinical trials. FDA resources aren't really the bottleneck, the FDA is generally faster than its counterparts in other countries.

This has been true for a while. Sadly.

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