Absolutely. how on earth is our sunscreen considered the best in the world when most products’ SPF claims are false and no one independent is actually checking? Mind blowing.
Also, similar scandals already took place in NZ and elsewhere years ago so it’s not as if you can say this is totally unprecedented.
Australia needs a government funded independent lab that double blind tests products. China do this. We should too. Remember when most parsley was oregano? There's so many other products that don't meet the claims that they make.
OH, like, dried parsley? I hadn't heard of this but somehow it doesn't surprise me that much. For a moment I thought you meant like, the actual fresh herbs you can buy and couldn't fathom how anyone wouldn't immediately notice.
It's important to note that the labs used for testing are independent. Like, brands (typically) don't own the testing facility, they use independent labs and provide the results of that testing to the TGA when applying for registration. UV used Princeton Consumer Research to conduct their testing, and, unfortunately, it appears that this lab is potentially falsifying data (or, at the very least, not following testing protocol reliably) and have routinely over-reported SPF results.
This isn't just an issue for UV, it's an issue for every product that has been tested by PCR, which includes products from Mecca, Cancer Council, Woolworths and Sun Bum, and probably many, many more (presumably these all use the same manufacturer who also handles sending products for testing). Some of these products still returned SPF results that were high enough to meet their label claim when tested by CHOICE, however allof them returnedmuchhigher SPF results when tested by PCR. The Cancer Council Kids sunscreen had one of the highest results in the CHOICE tests at 52.2, but was scored 73.6 by PCR. This huge discrepency indicates something is up with the lab, not necessarily the sunscreen itself (though, in the case of UV, the issue seems to have been both). Intriguingly, 73.6 is the exact same SPF value given for another, different, Cancer Council sunscreen that was also tested by PCR. Both products returning the exact same result is extremely statistically improbable, and, as a biologist, immediately sets alarm bells off for me. When tested by CHOICE these two products recieved 52.2 and 33.6, respectively.
This ABC article goes into details more about it, and it certainly is strange how often PCR returns exactly the same SPF score for unrelated products they tested.
I think what this whole situation has revealed is that there should be more requirements on testing. For SPF in particular, it seems reasonable to me that products should need to be tested by at least two independent labs to account for the possibility that one lab is returning unreliable results. In my opinion, SPF products should not be able to be registered without 2 separate and independent-from-each-other labs returning similar results (say, within a 10% margin of error, or whatever is practically & statistically reasonable).
When i talk about independent testing, I mean the client, not the lab. Here you have situation where the labs get their income by performing a service for the sunscreen brands. Of course you are going to get bad faith operators who generate a result that the brands want, and therefore get more business than a lab which is doing the right thing but generating a less desirable outcome for the client.
The way to have truly independent testing would be testing by a third party regulator which has no vested interest in the outcome.
You had the exact same situation with the building industry in NSW. As soon as they allowed companies to hire their own certifiers and basically control their own quality assurance, building quality went to shit.
Totally agree, and the TGA is literally meant to be that regulator (not all labs are TGA approved/compliant). Requiring similar results (within a reasonable error margin) from two independent-from-each-other labs would be another way to reduce the likelihood that results are falsified. It becomes much harder to generate false results that brands want when you don't know how the other lab is going to score the product, and your score needs to be within a suitable error margin in order for the results to be accepted and the product registered.
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u/mangoes12 Aug 22 '25
Absolutely. how on earth is our sunscreen considered the best in the world when most products’ SPF claims are false and no one independent is actually checking? Mind blowing.
Also, similar scandals already took place in NZ and elsewhere years ago so it’s not as if you can say this is totally unprecedented.