“Personally, I don’t use sunscreen with that ingredient, and I do not recommend it to my patients. “You don’t have to buy products with octocrylene, and hopefully, the companies and the FDA do the responsible thing and improve quality control checks on their products,” he says. Bunick says, is that consumers have choices and there are sunscreen products available that don’t have this chemical in them. We have a tendency in our society to say that it’s such a small amount and, therefore, it’s not harmful-but the chronic buildup of these chemicals could have a cumulative effect.” “It’s a chemical that doesn’t have to be there. “Benzophenone is a suspected carcinogen, and we know that this chemical reaction causing the degradation of octocrylene is occurring in sunscreen over time,” Dr. The researchers tested 16 octocrylene-based sunscreen sprays and lotions purchased in France and the U.S., and all of them tested positive for benzophenone. The study was by French and American researchers from Sorbonne University and Haerecticus Environmental Laboratory, a Virginia-based nonprofit that studies health and environmental risks. Products made with octocrylene can naturally degrade into the chemical benzophenone, a suspected carcinogen that can interfere with key hormones and reproductive organs, according to a study published in Chemical Research in Toxicology in March 2021. About 2,400 sun-protection products contain the ingredient. “One potential hypothesis of how the benzene was introduced is that it came from the ethanol used in the manufacturing process.” Understanding the octocrylene and benzophenone connectionĪnother group recently came out with data about a different carcinogen in certain sunscreens, calling for the FDA to remove all sunscreens containing the active ingredient octocrylene from sale. “A safe level of benzene in sunscreen products doesn’t exist,” Dr. In the meantime, consumers can make sure none of those recalled products are in their homes, but beyond that, it’s hard to give advice about how to handle this news since it’s still not clear how benzene got into the products. The FDA is reportedly evaluating Valisure’s petition. CVS and other brands quietly took some of theirs off the shelves, too,” Dr. “The fact that J&J recalled their products validates the findings. The contaminated products came from a variety of companies, including Johnson & Johnson, which in late July of 2021, issued a voluntary recall of several sunscreens from its Aveeno and Neutrogena brands. “Since there was a batch-to-batch variability of the benzene levels in the products, that makes us think it’s a problem in the manufacturing process and the companies aren’t doing enough quality control,” he says. It’s important to emphasize that the affected products were contaminated with benzene, something that could have happened to any product and not just sunscreen, says Dr. The company petitioned the FDA, asking for a recall of the contaminated products, and requested that the FDA better define limits for benzene contamination in drug and cosmetic products. What’s perhaps most troubling is that it is not an intended ingredient in any sunscreen product or production process, which leaves many wondering how it got in there and how they can protect themselves if there is no way to know how and when it was introduced.Īccording to Valisure’s report, 27% of the tested samples-which included aerosol sprays and lotions-contained detectable levels of benzene, and some contained up to three times the conditionally restricted FDA concentration limit of 2 parts per million. Long-term exposure to inhaled benzene can cause leukemia. It is also used to make some types of lubricants, rubbers, dyes, detergents, drugs, and pesticides. It is a highly flammable chemical that is a natural part of crude oil, gasoline, and cigarette smoke and is used to make plastics, nylon, and synthetic products. Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization, and other regulatory agencies. The FDA regulates sunscreen as a drug product and after-sun products as a cosmetic.īenzene is known to cause cancer in humans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Last May, Valisure, an independent quality assurance company in New Haven, Conn., detected high levels of benzene, a known human carcinogen, in 78 sunscreen and after-sun care products.
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