I have come across a newly released product family from...

I have come across a newly released product family from Coppertone - billion dollar global sunscreen brand owned by Bayer: Pure & Simple.


Seems to have been released within the last few weeks and is an all new family of 24.08% zinc oxide sunscreens.



The first review I've found is pretty nice:



The kicker? They are selling 8 fl oz / 236ml for $6.97 at Walmart (and Amazon, Walgreens and Target US) - sure puts @kearneymaurice's little venture under threat!

The new product line is actually retailing for less than half of what their own traditional chemical based sunscreen line is retailing for. This is something the ANO board has hyped for a while - making zinc mainstream and competitive with chemical UV absorbers.



Diving deeper into the product, it looks like this new range (which despite the branding for kids and baby etc all appear to be the exact same formulation) has replaced their previous product that was only 14.5% zinc oxide and 2 other chemical UV filters - making it a chemical/zinc hybrid sunscreen. They have replaced their Amazon listing of this former product with the new product which suggests they are killing the old one off when stock is out.

I presume the zinc oxide in that formulation was from an alternative supplier - potentially BASF via Nanophase - would make sense as BASF would have also supplied the chemical filters too. We heard in my post from several weeks ago that BASF/Nanophase had announced major revenue reductions due to loss in sales from competition from other suppliers (such as ANO) so it lines up perfectly with that.

FORMER PRODUCT (supplemented with chemicals)



NEW PRODUCT (zinc oxide sole active ingredient)


If you look further into their FDA registration paperwork you can see they label the product as "off-white" in its raw form - something ANO have stated in previous announcement about their new zinc oxide variant.

COPPERTONE FDA APPLICATION


ANO ANNOUNCEMENT


If you hop on to Coppertone's Facebook page you can see they are practically exclusively promoting the new product as of a few weeks ago.





I think that recent FDA Sunscreen regulation proposals are causing major stirs - a brand like Coppertone cannot be left holding a bag of chemical sunscreens they can't sell. Just yesterday the FDA published further study that 4 major chemical UV filters are found in the blood stream at significantly higher levels (40 times higher!) than the recommended threshold:

"A study published May 6 2019 in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA found that several active ingredients in different sunscreens enter the bloodstream at levels that far exceed the FDA's recommended threshold without a government safety inspection.

The 24 participants in the study were instructed to apply one of four different kinds of sunscreen spray, lotion or cream four times per day for four days on all areas that wouldn’t be covered by a swimsuit.

Researchers then measured the concentration of four different active ingredients in the participants’ blood: avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene and ecamsule. If the absorption exceeds 0.5 ng/mL, the FDA recommends “nonclinical toxicology assessment including systemic carcinogenicity and additional developmental and reproductive studies.”

For all ingredients, the levels of all chemicals far exceeded that limit on the first day of the study. Three of the ingredients remained in the bloodstream for seven days. For oxybenzone, which has been found along with other sunscreen ingredients in breast milk, plasma concentrations reached the threshold within two hours after a single application and exceeded 20 ng/mL on day 7 of the study."

It is becoming more and more likely to me that the FDA is not going to let chemical UV filters slide for much longer. The deadline for the FDA sunscreen proposal changes in November 2019 is getting close. What is fascinating here is that Avobenzone is in the firing line - which in the US, is pretty much the only chemical absorber that works across the UVA spectrum - without it - like a house of cards the rest of the chemicals can't hope to achieve broad spectrum protection.

So, there's no question here that Coppertone have moved from a chemical/zinc hybrid to a singular zinc oxide all natural solution to get away from this mess - and they have been able to do it with a price that is cheap even for chemical.

I think this is only possible for brands to do with ANO's zinc oxide.

Heck, when you run the numbers of what BASF sell Z-Cote for ($40-55 USD per kg - see below) it makes it almost impossible for this volume of zinc oxide to be sold in a product this cheap. What we know of ANO's price superiority per kg, it can be done.