Suncare

France has proposed an EU-wide restriction of octocrylene at 0.001%, a concentration at which it stops working as a filter. Benzophenone-3 is already capped at 2.2% in body products in the EU, and the FDA has removed PABA and trolamine salicylate from its sunscreen list. Enforcement lags the rules. Guam's import ban does not cover retail sale, leaving its health department without clear authority to penalise it; Maui County's ordinance drew brand-led beach campaigns rather than enforcement; and Hawaii's 2026 session declined to widen its ban because the approved alternative supply is too thin. Holland & Barrett banned the two named filters across its stores on its own.

The two lines of work that would add a new filter molecule have produced nothing a consumer can buy, and the one genuinely new filter of the window arrived through a regulatory order rather than through that chemistry. The effort has gone instead into the vehicle, the model that predicts it, and the supply chain around the filters already approved. That is a commitment to a fixed filter list, and it is the organising decision behind most of what follows.

A distinct line puts the mineral and the organic filter in the same particle rather than blending them. One filing pairs triethoxyoctylsilane-modified zinc oxide with modified silica to make the surface hydrophobic enough to resist sweat and seawater, alongside a five-filter organic blend. Another covalently bonds titanium dioxide to a lignin-cyclodextrin-aloe complex, using the lignin framework for UVA absorption while the coating suppresses the dioxide's photocatalytic activity. A third builds a photostable enhancement system from photostable agents plus surface-coated inorganic nanoparticles, and disperses nano-zinc oxide modified with polyhydroxystearic acid. Kolmar Korea reports a hybrid composite that encapsulates inorganic particles in organic components, with roughly 25% better long-UVA blocking in clinical testing. The caution sits in separate work: zinc oxide combined with organic filters has been found to accelerate their photodegradation, with the degraded mixtures more toxic in zebrafish assays, and photocatalytic oxidation has been measured when it is combined with two filters marketed as reef safe. The composites are built to close the gaps between the two filter classes; the photodegradation evidence is the cost that construction has to manage.

Bemotrizinol is the first new sunscreen active the FDA has added in decades, and the queue behind it is thin. Bisoctrizole, DHHB and Mexoryl 400 have been used in Europe and Asia for years but remain years from US approval. Brands work with the filters they already have, and the launches that followed the approval pair the new filter with old ones because the 6% cap forces combinations. The competitive space is the vehicle and the blend, not the active.

DSM gives its optimizer away alongside its Parsol range and BASF does the same with D'lite for its own portfolio, so a formulator who designs with a supplier's model designs inside that supplier's filter set. Shiseido's platform rests on more than 500,000 data points and Kolmar's on 36 years of its own records. The commitment is to the formulation dataset as the competitive asset, which is a different thing to own than a molecule.

Water and sweat resistance is built as a film. One filing combines polysiloxane-15, dextrin palmitate, trimethylsiloxysilicate, a VP/hexadecene copolymer and sunflower seed oil unsaponifiables into a single waterproof film-forming system, and reports protection and water resistance surviving immersion. Another dissolves a silane film-forming polymer in the oil phase so that it integrates the oil and solid phases into a three-dimensional network, reaching an in vitro SPF of at least 50 at 1 mg/cm². The film is also being modelled: BASF's filings treat the applied layer as a gamma distribution rather than a uniform thickness, adapting the shape parameter to the formulation type so that uneven application is inside the prediction.

Zinc oxide, the substitute the bans push formulators toward, has its own coral toxicity literature, and in a Maldives tank experiment a zinc oxide product labelled reef-safe caused 96% tissue loss in two hard coral species while the chemical-filter products caused mild or no effects. About 80% of reef-safe products surveyed contained inorganic filters, and the terms are unregulated marketing language. The EU is scoping its Cosmetics Regulation revision to account for combination effects between chemicals in a product.