Protect Your Skin This Summer -- Sunscreen Database

Every spring, I go to the store and buy some fresh sunscreen. When confronted with the shelves and shelves of available products, I try to quickly find the high SPF ones and leave the rest alone. I had no idea there were over 750 sunscreen products.

Nor did a know that a group did research on sunscreen products and now has a database available to direct you to what it feels are the safest ones. You can start reviewing the data from the Environmental Working Group at http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/special/sunscreens/summary.php .

From the study's Web site: "For this sunscreen analysis we obtained ingredient listings for 783 sunscreens primarily from online retailers. We constructed health hazard ratings for each product based on our analysis of information from our in- house database comprising nearly 60 standard industry, academic, and government regulatory and toxicity databases."

The results? The Environmental Working Group found only 17 (out of 783!) products that it considered to be both effective and low risk. Most of the products reviewed were considered by the EWG to be either high-risk or containing ingredients which caused safety concerns. (Look at the page above for a table.)
Here is the direct link for the products considered the most safe and the most effective. For every product there's a list of ingredients, safety tables for the ingredients, and pointers to any studies and concerns about that ingredient. (Alas, not all the pointers have Web links, but each ingredient listing has a bibliography of publication data at the end.)

This is a lot of data to wade though, and you may want to straight with looking at the best options and what EWG considers to be the worst options rather than to try to go through all 783 results. Just remember: wear your sunscreen!