By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post
Amazon.com reviews have become the indispensable buying guide for all sorts of products for busy Americans who either don’t have time to trek to a retail store or who just can’t be bothered.
We scrutinize them to figure out which movies to watch, which toaster does bagels right and which toddler booties hold up best.
The marketplace may have led you in the right direction with other consumer products, so you might wonder whether it’s a good place to read up on the sunscreen you’ve been meaning to buy this summer. The answer, according to a study published by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Shuai Xu, is yes and no.
Xu, a resident in dermatology, found that the selection of sunscreens on Amazon was vast — 6,500 — and there were tons of reviews that touched on all sorts of criteria including cosmetic issues (how well the substances absorb, feel, smell or exfoliate), performance (effective, obtainability of a tan), and skin compatibility (whether it might be good for sensitive skin, rosacea, etc.) The 6,500 included sunscreens that also included moisturizer or were tinted as makeup.
To create a manageable list, he ranked the products by taking into account many stars they got in their ratings by consumers and how many reviews were offered and picked out the top 1 percent for additional scrutiny. The results were published in JAMA Dermatology.
For those 65 sunscreens, Xu and his colleagues looked at how well they met American Academy of Dermatology minimum recommendations — that they are at least SPF 30, are broad spectrum and water/sweat resistant — and was surprised to find that 40 percent of these popular sunscreens were insufficient.
He said many reviews tended to focus on issues like smell, feel or on the sunscreen’s value as a cosmetic rather than actual sun protection.
Xu said in an interview that the idea for the study came from talking to patients who all asked the same question: Can you recommend a sunscreen?
“As doctors, we want to have some input and insight into what consumers are using, because sunscreen is a really important part of skin health,” he said. “We think of sunscreen as a form of topical medicine. It’s not a luxury product.”
Xu said that one important thing to keep in mind about the study is that if a product doesn’t meet AAD criteria for water resistance that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in certain, limited settings. “If it’s the middle of winter in Chicago and you’re not going to be exposed to water, it may be reasonable to forgo that criteria,” he said. However, you clearly don’t want to depend on that at the beach.
The study also found that the price of sunscreen varied greatly, from 68 cents an ounce to $23.47, but that the price wasn’t related to SPF number.
Sunscreens that were water resistant tended to be more pricey, and creams were more expensive than lotions and lotions than sprays.
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