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Australia's sunscreen showdown — and why SPF might be misunderstood
(www.sbs.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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I wouldn't be surprised if Choice fucked this test up. The wide range of results from the Cancer Council products was very strange.
Possibly, or the standards are vague. The PR person from the brand that had an SPF of 4’s spin was basically everything is SPF 50 if you put enough on.
That product description sounded to me like a mechanical (not chemical) sunscreen. Unlinke chemical sunscreens those tend to have a visible whitening effect when applied properly. Given that the Choice tests were blind and on human skin, I can imagine a scenario where it was "rubbed in" like chemical sunscreen until invisible, and gave the absurdly low score as a genuine result of misapplication
On the other hand, two independent labs getting similar awful results is damning.
It's unfortunate the responses from these companies are mostly along the lines of "nuh-uh". It's good that there have been some emergency retests, but I would have hoped that someone would have worked with Choice to figure out what was up rather than just telling them "you did it wrong".
That would make sense.
I agree that working with Choice to understand would have been a much wiser PR decision