To measure how well sunscreen protects against sunburn, conventional testing deliberately exposes volunteers’ skin to ultraviolet (UV) doses that cause redness. A European Commission-funded testing campaign has examined an alternative that avoids this exposure: testing sunscreen on acrylic plates instead of people. European Commission, DG GROW (source, opens in new tab)
European Commission, DG GROWEU moves to more ethical sunscreen testingOpen source (opens in new tab)
SPF, or sun protection factor, measures protection against UVB-related sunburn. The laboratory method calculates it by measuring how much UV passes through a film of sunscreen spread over test plates. The aim is to assess protection without having to produce redness in anyone’s skin.
In a comparison involving 74 products, the Commission reports on its website a high correlation between laboratory and volunteer results. This means products with higher readings in one test tended to have higher readings in the other. It does not establish that the two methods gave closely matching SPF values for each product, or that they can be used interchangeably.
The comparison took place in 2025 and included sunscreens and day creams selected by market-surveillance authorities from 11 EU countries. The campaign compared measurements of both SPF and protection against ultraviolet A (UVA) radiation.
The Commission says the laboratory approach is faster and cheaper. Measuring UV transmission also avoids a complication of using skin redness to judge protection: soothing or anti-inflammatory ingredients may reduce or delay that redness. According to the Commission, those effects do not influence the laboratory measurement.
The method nevertheless has practical limits. Powders and sticks cannot currently be tested with it, and assessing water-resistance claims requires further method development.
For the products it can test, the crucial missing detail is how far the two methods’ results differed. The Commission’s news page gives no numerical correlation, individual product results or statistics showing how closely the measurements agreed. It also does not report whether the methods reached the same pass-or-fail decisions. Avoiding volunteers’ UV exposure is a clear advantage; the published information leaves open whether switching tests would change the conclusion about a particular sunscreen’s protection.
- European Commission, DG GROW · InstitutionEU moves to more ethical sunscreen testingsingle-market-economy.ec.europa.eu · opens in new tab
