Why doesn't the US have better sunscreen?

0:01Stacey Vanek Smith:NPR.

0:06Stacey Vanek Smith:Charlotte Palomino runs a company called Dew. Dew is a clinical skincare brand. She's also popular on TikTok and Instagram. I don't know, is Skinfluencer a bit too crass to say? How would you say it? Yes. No, I mean, I talk a lot about skincare on the internet. And so, yes, I try to influence people on purchasing decisions. In 2018, Charlotte was in a specialty skincare shop and she tried on a Japanese sunscreen. I remember putting it on my face and being like, what is this? Biore UV Aqua Riche. It is an incredible texture. It has a beautiful, cooling, watery effect. And I remember I applied so much on my face.

0:48It was then that Charlotte learned that the United States just doesn't have great sunscreens. Unlike the rest of the world, the Food and Drug Administration hadn't approved a new sunscreen ingredients since the late 90s.

0:58Stacey Vanek Smith:And this means that the sunscreen here is gloopier and stickier, discouraging people to use it. It also means the U.S. is behind on the effectiveness of its sunscreens, which is important because there's more than 5 million cases of skin cancer diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Sunscreen could have prevented many of those cases. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Waylon Wong. Today on the show, how to get better sunscreen. We look at why the U.S. went into a sunscreen freeze, what this tells us about American regulation, and one economist's proposal to fix the burning problem.

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2:49Stacey Vanek Smith:When you interview a skincare influencer, you have to ask for tips. Of course. What's one piece of skincare advice you give me? I use nothing apart from daily sunscreen. You are doing so great. What? So I was looking at the stats. It's a ridiculous number. Like only 13 % of people in America are wearing sunscreen daily. So I'm already in the top 13 % of skincare. You and Paul Rudd. Oh. Paul Rudd, ageless skincare icon. I also wear sunscreen on my face every day. Look, but you know, she had some more to say. I would recommend, do you wash your face? I don't. I mean, I have a shower, so my face incidentally gets some, but I don't consciously wash my face.

3:33Do you wash your body? Yeah. So your face is part of your body.

3:36Stacey Vanek Smith:That is true. Charlotte with the facts. I got roasted, Waylon. Did she recommend some products for you then? Yeah, there's some other things about exfoliations and I don't know, but I got to get the basics first. Anyway, it was time to move along. All right. Enough about my hygiene habits. But so when you learned that the U.S. lacks superior sunscreens, what did you do? So I first, well, I called my representatives. You know, I love complaining on the Internet. Don't we all? I know, right? I'm like, I'm half French. It's part of my culture. But I also started making videos and creating, you know, resources for people to call their representatives.

4:19Charlotte learned that one reason why the U.S. is slower to approve sunscreen ingredients is that it's regulated as a drug and not a cosmetic. That means that ingredients need clinical evidence, not only that they're safe, but that they're effective too. One Swiss-Dutch company was trying to meet those standards, Charlotte found out. I got in touch with DSM Firminich, where I found out that they were actually doing a lot of the work. DSM Firminich was sponsoring an ingredient to get recognized as generally safe and effective. The company's hope was that it could then sell that ingredient wholesale to sunscreen makers.

4:51The ingredient was called Bematrizonal.

4:53Stacey Vanek Smith:Paran Salmasinia is the president of the company's beauty and care group. It's been used internationally for many, many, many years, but it had not been available for the U.S. market. It was a void in the U.S. When did the process start? Oh, my God. A long time ago. It's decades and decades that we have been at work with this. Peran says they did clinical studies on nearly 500 participants representing the diversity of the U.S. population. She also says that the COVID pandemic put them at a lower priority for the FDA for understandable reasons. There were some moments that we were very scared.

5:29Oh my God, is this going to come at the end of the day? And we knew it was a matter of time.

5:34Stacey Vanek Smith:DSM Fermanish spent at least$18 million to try to get that FDA approval. Charlotte Palomino was impressed. They had lobbyists, and I had to, you know, learn the hard way on how things are actually moved through, you know, sometimes arduous legislation. The CARES Act in 2020 was a key piece. Among all the COVID relief funding, it also created a more streamlined process for companies to try to get sunscreen ingredient approval. But even a couple years after this passed, we still didn't have any new sunscreen ingredients. So Charlotte teamed up with a Democratic representative. Hello everyone, this is Rep AOC and I'm here with Charlotte Palomino.

6:14I'm a brand owner, but also... And they made a short video together. Please contact your member of Congress. Ask them to break through some of the regulatory barriers at the FDA.

6:25Stacey Vanek Smith:This became sort of a bipartisan issue. A law was passed in 2025 that allowed more types of safety and efficacy evidence to be accepted. In June this year, Bimetrizonol was approved in the U.S. Yes, the first active sunscreen ingredient to be broadly used in about three decades. Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University who's been writing about the FDA and sunscreen for a long time. Only finally now, after such a long delay, are we getting it approved in the United States. He thinks that the long delay for sunscreen is representative of a wider issue, which is an overcautious Food and Drug Administration.

7:06It is too risk-averse. In fact, you can have over-precaution, deadly precaution. Wanting to be too safe can actually make you less safe.

7:18Stacey Vanek Smith:One in five Americans will get skin cancer by age 70. Most will survive, but the numbers could be reduced with better and more frequently used sunscreen. Now, Alex is not denying that there could be risks from new ingredients. 30, 50 years, 100 years from now, maybe we'll find out that the sunscreens we approved were not as safe as they thought they were. But in the meantime, we know the sun can cause cancer, and we ought to be making the best choices we can today. So Alex has a solution. If another stringent authority, like the European Medical Agency, if it approves a drug or device, it ought to be automatically approved in the United States.

7:59This idea is called peer approval. If a German tourist comes to the United States, as many recently have, you know, for the World Cup, we accept their driver's licenses.

8:10Stacey Vanek Smith:Yeah, the U.S. trusts the German government to regulate who can and can't drive. Alex thinks it should be the same for medicine. Now, that is not without risks. So what about the risk of something being approved that ends up being really bad for people? I'm thinking about thalidomide, the morning sickness drug in the 1960s. It was refused approval by the FDA, but other countries approved the drug, and that resulted in more than 10 ,000 babies being born with birth defects. Isn't a strong FDA protecting us from repeats of the thalidomide disaster? In my view, thalidomide killed far more people by creating this excessively precautionary, risk-averse attitude in the FDA than it ever did by briefly being approved elsewhere.

9:02People are buried in what I call the invisible graveyard. And because they're much harder to see, the political process does not take into account the deaths in the invisible graveyard as much as it does the fewer but more visible injuries which are caused when a bad drug sometimes is approved. Republican Senator Ted Cruz actually introduced a bill in recent years to fast-track the approval of drugs that are allowed in peer countries. It hasn't gained a lot of traction.

9:32Stacey Vanek Smith:We asked the FDA why it had taken so long to approve any new sunscreen ingredients. And in a statement, they wrote that previous applications for new ingredients were lacking sufficient scientific information about their safety. They cited an outside group of experts that backs up the FDA's requirements. As for Charlotte Palomino, she has plans to make a sunscreen with Bemetrizanol. We've been working on formulas for years, and so we're working on it. And as for me, I've started washing my face. Darian, so Charlotte influenced you to start washing your face. I was skin-fluenced. Before we go, we're doing a live Q &A this Thursday with Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather.

10:20Stacey Vanek Smith:She's going to help us understand what's going on in the U.S. housing market and answer your questions. It's on Thursday, July 23rd at 3 p.m. Eastern or noon Pacific. For PLUS supporters, check out the latest bonus episode in the Planet Money feed for details. And if you haven't joined PLUS yet, now's the time. Just go to plus.npr.org. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Travis Hagan. It was fact-tracked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concanon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place.

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