Blog

Happy National Sunscreen Day! We celebrated by testing dozens of SPF products for benzophenone, which is a carcinogenic chemical that requires a warning under Proposition 65. We sent notices of violation to 13 sunscreen companies with levels of benzophenone that threshold legally allowed under Prop 65 and have listed these brands at the end of this post to help you avoid them. 

But one sunscreen in particular really shocked us with how much benzophenone it contained. EltaMD’s Skincare UV Sheer Face and Body Sunscreen came back with such high amounts of benzophenone that we’re also asking the company that owns it (Colgate-Palmolive) to reformulate the product to remove benzophenone and make a safer sunscreen.  

Our test results show EltaMD’s Skincare UV Sheer Face and Body Sunscreen contains more benzophenone than any of the other SPF products CEH tested. In fact, if you used this EltaMD’s Skincare UV Sheer Face and Body Sunscreen daily (as recommended on the product label) you would be applying more than hundreds of times as much benzophenone as the threshold! 

And exposure to benzophenone is no joke. Benzophenone can penetrate through the skin and cause liver, kidney, and blood cancer as well as endocrine dysfunction.

Protecting our skin from the sun is a critical part of maintaining skin health and preventing skin cancer. SPF products like the ones we tested can be invaluable tools in protecting your skin, but we want to feel confident that we can use SPF products like EltaMD according to package directions without risking reproduction issues, endocrine-disruption, and cancer. 

This National Sunscreen Day, let’s celebrate sunscreen by asking Colgate-Palmolive to make EltaMD Skincare UV Sheer Face and Body Sunscreen safer.