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 sees people spritzing sunscreen as if it's cologne at the pool where he lives in Austin, Texas, he wants to intervene. "My wife says I shouldn't," he said, "even though most people rarely use enough sunscreen."

At issue is not just whether people are using enough sunscreen, but what ingredients are in it.

In countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France, sunscreens include newer chemical filters, some of which have been shown to provide broader protection against UV rays than those used in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration's ability to approve such ingredients is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that has required sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world. 

So Americans are not likely to get those other sunscreens — which do a better job of 

 that can cause skin cancer and lead to wrinkles — in time for this summer, or even the next.

Sunscreen makers say the U.S. approval standards are unfair because companies, including 

 which make the newer sunscreen chemicals, submitted 

Steven Goldberg, a retired vice president of BASF, said companies are wary of the FDA process because of the cost and their fear that additional animal testing could ignite a 

The companies are asking Congress to change the testing requirements before they take steps to enter the U.S. marketplace.

In a rare example of bipartisanship last summer, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, 

, D-N.Y., for urging the FDA to speed up approvals of new, more effective sunscreen ingredients. Now a bipartisan bill is pending in the House that would 

"It goes back to sunscreens being classified as over-the-counter drugs," said Carl D'Ruiz, a senior manager at DSM-Firmenich, a Switzerland-based maker of sunscreen chemicals. "It's really about giving the U.S. consumer something that the rest of the world has. People aren't dying from using sunscreen. They're dying from melanoma."

Safer sunscreen? Misinformation in the sunscreen debate

 in the United States. Skin cancer is the 

 in America, and 6.1 million adults are treated each year for basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, according to the 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

. The nation's second-most-common cancer, breast cancer, is diagnosed about 

Though skin cancer treatment success rates are excellent, 1 in 5 Americans will develop skin cancer by age 70. The disease costs the health care system 

, according to CDC researchers. One study found that the annual cost of treating skin cancer in the United States 

 from 2002 to 2011, while the average annual cost for all other cancers increased by just 25%. 

And unlike many other cancers, most forms of skin cancer can largely be prevented — by using sunscreens and taking other precautions.

But a heavy dose of misinformation has permeated the sunscreen debate, and some people question the safety of common sunscreen ingredients (such as 

 avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, and octocrylene) in the United States, which they deride as "chemical" sunscreens. 

These sunscreen opponents prefer "physical" or "mineral" sunscreens, such as zinc oxide, even though all sunscreen ingredients are chemicals. 

"It's an artificial categorization," said E. Dennis Bashaw, a retired FDA official who ran the agency's clinical pharmacology division that studies sunscreens.

 after it published a study that said some sunscreen ingredients had been found in trace amounts in human bloodstreams. When the 

, that older sunscreen ingredients needed to be studied more to see if they were safe, sunscreen opponents saw an opening, said 

, president of Alpha Research & Development, which imports chemicals used in cosmetics.

"That's why we have extreme groups and people who aren't well informed thinking that something penetrating the skin is the end of the world," Shaath said. "Anything you put on your skin or eat is absorbed." 

Ingredients that work better to block UVA rays

Adamson, the Austin dermatologist, said some sunscreen ingredients already available in the U.S. have been used for 30 years without any population-level evidence that they have harmed anyone. 

"The issue for me isn't the safety of the sunscreens we have," he said. "It's that some of the chemical sunscreens aren't as broad spectrum as they could be, meaning they do not block UVA as well. This could be alleviated by the FDA allowing new ingredients."

 falls between X-rays and visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Most of the UV rays that people come in contact with are UVA rays that can penetrate the middle layer of the skin and that cause up to 90% of skin aging, along with a smaller amount of UVB rays that are 

The sun protection factor, or SPF, rating on American sunscreen bottles denotes only a sunscreen's ability to block UVB rays. Although American sunscreens labeled "broad spectrum" should, in theory, block UVA light, 

 to meet the European Union's higher UVA-blocking standards.

"It looks like a number of these newer chemicals have a better safety profile in addition to better UVA protection," said 

, deputy director of Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that researches the ingredients in consumer products. "We have asked the FDA to consider allowing market access."

The FDA defends its review process and its call for tests of the sunscreens sold in American stores as a way to ensure the safety of products that many people use daily, rather than just a few times a year at the beach.

"Many Americans today rely on sunscreens as a key part of their skin cancer prevention strategy, which makes satisfactory evidence of both safety and effectiveness of these products critical for public health," Cherie Duvall-Jones, an FDA spokesperson, wrote in an email.

The path to approval for one overseas ingredient: bemotrizinol

D'Ruiz's company, DSM-Firmenich, is the only one currently seeking to have a new over-the-counter sunscreen ingredient approved in the United States. The company has spent the past 20 years trying to gain 

, a process D'Ruiz said has cost $18 million and has advanced fitfully, despite attempts by Congress in 2014 and 2020 to speed along applications for new UV filters.

Bemotrizinol is the bedrock ingredient in nearly all European and Asian sunscreens, including those by the South Korean brand 

D'Ruiz said bemotrizinol could secure FDA approval by the end of 2025. If it does, he said, bemotrizinol would be the most vetted and safest sunscreen ingredient on the market, outperforming even the safety profiles of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

As Congress and the FDA debate, many Americans have taken to importing their own sunscreens from Asia or Europe, despite the 

"The sunscreen issue has gotten people to see that you can be unsafe if you're too slow," said 

, a professor of economics at George Mason University. "The FDA is just incredibly slow. They've been looking at this now literally for 40 years. Congress has ordered them to do it, and they still haven't done it."

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Michael Scaturro

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Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the U.S. and we need all the protection we can get. So why is it so hard to get newer, more effective ingredients approved here?

Other countries have better sunscreens. Here's why we can't get them in the U.S.

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