this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Sunscreen is pretty vital and I absolutely agree we shouldn't talk about cancer in that way, but skin cancer is very preventable.
This is talking about the UV testing scandal that broke last year, essentially which has provoked a new standard to be developed.
Be careful there's a lot of bullshit propaganda about sunscreen out there, you really want to be careful what you buy into, sunscreen isn't toxic, and you may have been lead down the garden path, with settling into the bottom of the sea, that's not a thing. Happens to the best of us!
I literally studied metallic sunscreen in university lol. Zinc and titanium sunscreens do settle because the particles are large, "invisible" nanoparticulate sunscreen (often not labelled because aus regs work on mean size not range) has particles that stay suspended because of Brownian motion and accumulate in fish embroys and fuck shit up in corals and bivalves (at least).
Organic sunscreens (the oily kind common because nobody wants to look like a custard pie hit them) are toxic to shitloads of marine life.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X2500102X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X26004108
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-021-00515-w (indicates that organic evidence has become murkier since I studied)
If you're gonna be smug and condescending at least have the decency to be right
There's even an environment effects section on wikipedia. This shit is mainstream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen
edit: also the article is not spending much time on the scandal and instead dicussing how SPF inflation is a marketing gimmick and more important is proper and regular application (why people keep getting UV damage)
What sunscreens do you recommend?
If you're concerned about marine life the most significant thing most people can do is go vegan. Run off from cattle farms, crops grown to feed or "finishʾ cattle, fish farms and fishing are completely and utterly devastating.
If you want serious sun protection the pasty metallic ones (sometimes marketed as mineral sunscreen) that aren't invisible/nanoparticle stuff work great, are seemingly less bad for marine life, and because you can actually see them you can tell when they need reapplying because you've wiped some off.
Most people don't want to look like they're getting even for blackface's sake though. Nanoparticle sunscreen might not be as bad as some organics but I am extremely warey of anything long lived that bioaccumulates given our amazing track record.
So if you want a balance between not looking stupid and probably not singlehandedly causing bleaching events (again it's negligible next to not deliberately killing stuff in the ocean and the carbon emissions of carnism) then organic sunscreens that avoid the ingredients banned in Hawaii (oxybenzone and octinoxate) don't seem too bad (it's also understudied though, and results in petri dishes aren't always applicable to the world). Banana boat has a reasonable track record and several of these available.