Halfway through 2024, if you want to ask which track is the hottest and the most competitive landscape in China's cosmetics industry this year, the answer must be sunscreen.
But compared with market data, the following two news about the tightening of regulations in the international sunscreen market seem to be more worthy of in-depth study.
In the first and second quarters of this year, the US FDA required the resumption of animal testing on a number of sunscreens, and the European Union Federation removed and banned the chemical sunscreen "4-methylbenzylidene camphor" (4-MBC) from the approved list. Internationally, in recent years, the sunscreen market has paid more and more attention to the safety of sunscreens, and has carried out continuous research on the permeability and cytotoxicity of sunscreens.
What is relatively fragmented is that there are very few brands in China's sunscreen cosmetics market that use "safety" as a selling point, and most consumers are not aware of the fact that sunscreens may have safety risks. However, FBeauty also interviewed a number of sunscreen R&D people and found that this new trend has developed and grown in the domestic sunscreen field.
Many of them believe that the research and development of sunscreen for the purpose of safety may have the opportunity to expand an independent market route in China and become the focus of future market competition.
Sunscreen safety issues
"Alarm bells" in the European and American markets
Of all the skincare categories, sunscreen is almost the one with the most restrictive ingredient restrictions and the fewest major ingredients that can be used.
Since 1891, when Friedrich Hammer created the first chemical sunscreen in history, more than 60 sunscreens have been researched and developed internationally [1], but due to concerns about the safety of sunscreens, the European Commission (EC), the China Food and Drug Administration, and the US FDA have strictly restricted the use of sunscreens.
Among them, there are 26 EU standards excluding the 4-MBCs that were removed this year; There are 27 sunscreens available by the China Food and Drug Administration, and only 16 sunscreens can be used by the US FDA due to a stricter review mechanism that treats sunscreens as drugs.
The fundamental reason for this is that many chemical sunscreens are "market applications" ahead of "basic research", and only then do they conclude that they are not safe through consumer adverse reaction cases or clinical observations.
For example, the European Union's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) concluded in April that there is ample evidence that the chemical sunscreen 4-MBC may act as an endocrine disruptor and have effects on both the thyroid and estrogen systems. It is understood that this is the result of four security assessments conducted by the EU over the past 20 years. [2] The above cases show that the research on the safety of a sunscreen in the field of R&D is constantly deepening. Nowadays, the transdermal rate and bleeding rate of sunscreen raw materials have become two important criteria for safety evaluation – if the raw material is a small molecule that can penetrate the skin and bleed and reach a certain depth value, then it is necessary to further investigate the safety and clinical impact of the ingredient.
A recent case occurred in May 2019, when the FDA evaluated the systemic absorption and results of four active sunscreen ingredients used in commercially available sunscreen products (avobenzone, benzophenone-3, octocrylene, and McSunin filter rings) under maximum use conditions, and in a follow-up toxicology evaluation, the results showed that the four components in the subject's blood not only exceeded the standard threshold level of 0.5 ng/mL, but the bleeding test for benzophenone-containing sunscreen even exceeded the standard threshold by 419 times. [3]
So far, the specific effects of these ingredients after bleeding have not been thoroughly studied, but researchers believe that the potential risk of damaging the hormone system, causing allergic reactions, and even cancer and organ poisoning cannot be ruled out. Although the experiment was a "limit experiment under abnormal conditions", the publication of the study in the Journal of American Medical Association (Impact Factor 63.1) caused an uproar in the skincare community. The "butterfly effect" of the event also spread to the Chinese market for a time, #防晒霜或含有害成分#话题当时在新浪微博阅读量超过2 900 million.
Screenshot from JAMA official website
For the academic and regulatory circles, this experiment has once again become a hammer to supervise the safety research of sunscreen raw materials.
Targeting sun protection safety risks
The century-old company made a first move
In fact, the China Food and Drug Administration has become more and more stringent about the permitted types, dosages, and addition requirements of sunscreens.
For example, in the 2021 draft revision of the catalogue of prohibited raw materials for cosmetics, the UVB sunscreen "3-benzylene camphor" was "blacked" by the Food and Drug Administration due to thyroid toxicity.
"This will inevitably affect the trend of the sunscreen market, and also test how brands can avoid, solve and prevent the safety problems of the sunscreen system, and prepare for the future." A sunscreen R&D person commented on this.
"FBeauty Future Traces" found that some leading enterprises in China, represented by Shanghai Jahwa, have carried out high-standard R&D reserves and product layouts in this direction one step earlier. Dr. Jia Haidong, head of R&D at Shanghai Jahwa, told FBeauty that macromolecular systems are bound to be one of the future trends in the sunscreen market:
On the one hand, consumers are paying more and more attention to the safety of cosmetics, especially for people with sensitive skin, and the safety of sunscreens has received special attention. In the future development trend of sunscreen, safe, efficient and ocean-friendly sunscreen products are the general trend.
On the other hand, human clinical trials are particularly important to ensure that the safety of sunscreen products can be verified by authoritative medical institutions. Under such an underlying logic, Yuze, a medical research co-creation brand under Shanghai Jahwa, also takes safety as the core, while taking into account the innovative ideas of stability, efficiency and environmental friendliness, and pioneered a subversive macromolecular sunscreen system in 2022. Yuze macromolecular sunscreen products were born, leading the sunscreen market into a new concept of macromolecules.
It is understood that the "MM3" macro-molecule UV filter system (3Macro-molecule UV Filters) can perfectly solve the transdermal problem, photolysis problem and environmental friendliness problem by screening the structure, polarity, molecular weight (molecular weight greater than 500 dalton) and other dimensions of the sunscreen, and finally present a safe, efficient and ocean-friendly sunscreen system.
"A larger molecular weight means that the sunscreen stays more on the surface of the skin, which reduces the risk of transdermal penetration into the skin, and it also means it is safer and gentler." Lao Shuquan, Director of Symrise Cosmetic Ingredients in China, pointed out, "Today, macromolecular sunscreen has gradually become one of the hottest types of sunscreens. ”
In order to ensure that the safety of the product can be verified by authoritative institutions, Shanghai Jahwa Yuze brand and Ruijin Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine have further conducted human clinical tests on the exposure of sunscreen in vivo.
It is understood that this test recruited healthy adult male and female volunteers aged 18-60 in Shanghai, and asked these volunteers to apply sunscreen multiple times a day, and then Shanghai Jahwa and Ruijin Hospital accurately obtained the transdermal penetration data of sunscreen in the product by detecting the transdermal efficiency, blood distribution, and exposure quantitative analysis of the main components of the sunscreen.
The test results showed that the core sunscreen in the blood sample was detected 2 hours later, and the internal exposure rate of each component was less than 0.5ng/ml, and the combined exposure rate was 0% in the test population of the clinical trial. According to FDA standards, an ingredient with an exposure value of less than 0.5ng/mL in the blood means that the ingredient is safe. This also means that in this clinical test of in vivo exposure of sunscreens, Yuze macromolecular sunscreen has a strong safety proven by medical evidence-based data.
Yuze macromolecular sunscreen in vivo exposure Ruijin Hospital human clinical testing
In this test, Yuze actually created two firsts: to achieve China's first human clinical test of in vivo exposure of a large molecule sunscreen, instead of only the commonly used animal model or in vitro model test, and for the first time to provide strong data support for higher safety standards of topical skin sunscreens; In addition, Yuze will further observe the exposure after long-term use, and on this basis, through visual analysis, study the metabolic pathway changes of sunscreen in the skin microenvironment.
Through the technological foresight with an international perspective and the cooperation with Ruijin Hospital Medical Research, it can be said that Yuze has taken a big step forward in the safety research of sunscreen cosmetics in China.
The next competition point in the sunscreen market
As consumers' awareness of sunscreen has upgraded from "anti-black whitening" to "sunscreen must prevent aging", the size of China's sunscreen market has more than quadrupled in the past 15 years, reaching 17.41 billion yuan in 2023, accounting for 16.2% of the global sunscreen market, becoming the world's second largest sunscreen market after the United States (22.4%). [4]
FBeauty found that safety may become the next competition point in the sunscreen market. The Shanghai Jahwa R&D team further pointed out that specifically, there are two paths for safe sunscreen that are worth continuing to explore.
One direction is to use sunscreens that are safe for humans and have less impact on the environment, so as to ensure that their adverse effects on the human body and the environment are minimized.
On this basis, another important research direction is to minimize the penetration of sunscreen into the human body through the skin through the design of sunscreen systems. It is understood that among the 27 sunscreens allowed to be used in the "Safety and Technical Specifications for Cosmetics", only 8 of them have a molecular weight greater than 500 daltons. In the future, the use of pure macromolecular sunscreens will be a safe and effective technology trend.
Based on this information, Yuze macromolecular sunscreen not only designs a professional sunscreen system with human safety and environmental safety as the core, but also takes into account the market demand for sensitive skin and skin-nourishing sunscreen.
Now the trend has come, and Yuze, a subsidiary of Shanghai Jahwa, has long been ready.
References: [1] Expert Consensus on Skin Sunscreen, Skin Sunscreen Expert Consensus, Dermatology Development Working Committee, Dermatologist Branch, Chinese Medical Doctor Association (2019)
[2] History of sunscreen: An updated view,JCosmet Dermatol. 2021 Apr; 20(4):1044-1049. doi: 10.1111/jocd.14004Epub 2021 Feb 21.
[3] Effect of Sunscreen Application Under Maximal Use Conditions on Plasma Concentration of Sunscreen Active Ingredients,JAMA. 2019; 321(21):2082-2091. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.5586.Shahbandeh M. Global market value of the sun care market 2018–2029,statista,2020 Jun 11.
Author/Wu Sixin
Proofreading / Gui Yuqian