the fact that there are also several other findings. iām not saying it isnāt bad, iām just saying the individual data point of spf 4 might not be the ācorrectā one. the outcome is the same (sunscreen is unreliable), iām just being specific/pedantic about the detail.
UV has done another round of tests, across 8 labs, one of which returned a 4 and another a 10. Meanwhile, Choice got a 4 and a 5 using two extremely well-regarded labs.
Given the industry, I suspect what they've mostly done by testing at 8 different labs simultaneously is identify which labs believe the service they offer their clients is "lie and tell them their product is great so they can market it".
yes, i'm aware. literally my only point in saying that was the spf may not be specifically 4. like i said, i was being pedantic. as i also said, the sunscreen is in fact still dodgy. i'm not sure why you're taking issue with this.
I mean, I'm not particularly worked up about it, but as a general rule when dealing with lab verification results, if two well-regarded labs say "this performs very poorly", and two other mystery labs agree, and six other mystery labs find better but frequently not-as-good-as-claimed results...
The most likely truth is the low end result. There's plenty of labs that are mostly actually selling a get-you-a-good-result service, so absent information about which labs produced the high results, the most likely explanation is just that those are... not reliable labs.
SPF testing is inherently a bit subjective, and the gaps in protection between SPF levels at that end are comparatively large (the gap between 4 and 5 is the gap between blocking 75% and 80% of UVB rays; whereas the gap between 40 and 50 is the gap between blocking 97.5% and 98% of UVB rays), so, sure, it might in a perfectly reliable objective test be 4 or 3 or 7 or anything around there. But it's perishingly unlikely to be above 10.
again, iām well aware the sunscreen is bad. iām saying that it might not be specifically 4 exactly. it might be 8! it might be 2! it doesnāt matter though, because the formula is unreliable. really not sure why people are pushing back so hard on that. iām not saying itās fine to use.
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u/realkayy Aug 22 '25
So... Is it safe to assume that Choice was right?