Consumer NZ says nine out of 20 sunscreens don't provide protection they claim

Wednesday, 20 November 2019

Cancer Society sunblock has failed to live up to its sun-protection claims for the second year running, Consumer NZ says.

The Cancer Society's Everyday Very High Protection Sun Lotion SPF50+ was tested at two different labs and returned a maximum of SPF30. To claim SPF50+, a sunscreen has to achieve SPF60 in lab tests.

This is the second year Cancer Society sunscreen has failed Consumer NZ's tests.

It is voluntarily withdrawing a batch of sunscreen from sale as a result.

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Cancer Society chief executive Mike Kernaghan said it had its products independently tested and they had exceeded the SPF claims.

But the Everyday Very High Protection Sun Lotion SPF50+, with an expiry of October 2021, had different results in the Consumer NZ tests.

'We would have preferred to retest the batch to prove its effectiveness, however that would take eight weeks so we've made the call to voluntarily withdraw the batch from retailers now,' Kernaghan said.

'We remain 100 per cent confident in the effectiveness of our sunscreen products because they are manufactured as a medicine in Australia and have been independently tested. I would like to reassure the public there is no health risk, because even at the lower level of SPF30 that batch still provides high protection.'

Out of the 20 sunscreens tested by Consumer in 2019, nine failed to live up to the claims on the bottle.

Sunsense Ultra SPF50+, Banana Boat Dry Balance Sunscreen Lotion SPF50+ and Marine Blue Australia Dry Touch Sunscreen Lotion SPF50+ also failed to meet their SPF50+ claims, Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin said.

The products only provided moderate protection, returning results from 20.61 to 26.4 SPF.

Five other products also didn't provide the SPF claimed on the label, although still provided high protection (SPF 30 to 50), and three sunscreens didn't provide the broad-spectrum protection claimed, Consumer NZ found.

Cancer Society has come under fire again for its 50+ SPF sunscreen.

Chetwin said some of the issues could relate to the testing labs used by the sunscreen companies.

Several companies, including the Cancer Society and Sunsense, had tested their products at AMA Laboratories, a sunscreen-testing facility in the US.

Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin says the government needs to regulate the sunscreen industry.

In 2019, the United States Federal Food and Drug Administration announced the lab's owner had been charged with, and some staff had pleaded guilty to, falsifying test results from 1987 to April 2017.

The AMA Laboratories tests used by Cancer Society were from 2019, Sunsense's tests were from 2016, Chetwin said.

'For many years, sunscreen companies have been sending us test results from AMA that conflicted with our tests. We think companies relying on these results should urgently re-test at a different lab to ensure they can back up claims,' she said.

In 2018, a man says he was seriously burnt after using the Cancer Society SPF50+ sunscreen.

Chetwin called on the government to urgently regulate sunscreens and require adherence to Australian and New Zealand standards.

Chetwin said her organisation had also asked for regulations to specify how often sunscreens must be tested and include minimum requirements for test labs.

In January, Cancer Society chief executive Mike Kernaghan defended the sunscreen amidst a social media storm over the product's effectiveness.

Kernaghan blamed user error for many of the sunburn complaints the organisation had received.

'We manufacture our sunscreen in Australia and the reason is that in Australia sunscreen is classified as a medicine, and so there are very strict manufacturing protocols around any medicine that's made there,' he said at the time.