Hacker News

> I have no skin in this game

You literally have if you use sunscreen. ;)

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

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.

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

Does that make them safer?

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

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"?

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...

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.

Titanium dioxide is now an IARC 2B suspected carcinogen.

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.

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

Tinted sunscreens solve this problem.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

It could, but everybody got an orange tan afterwards.