In May, Primally Pure launched a campaign for beef tallow-infused mineral sunscreen with billboards in Los Angeles and Chicago that declared, “The sun isn’t poison but your sunscreen is,” enraging beauty industry insiders worried the messages instill fear in people and undermine usage of sunscreens to prevent skin cancer.

Primally Pure founder Bethany McDaniel has doubled down on the campaign, asserting on social media that it’s intended to inspire conversation and that the brand is not anti-sunscreen, but “pro questioning what’s inside of the products we are putting on our largest organ, the skin.” The brand avoids sunscreen filters such as oxybenzone and octinoxate due to concerns that the filters are potential endocrine disruptors. Michelle Wong, the cosmetic chemist and science educator known as Lab Muffin, points out they haven’t been documented to disrupt human hormones at the levels in sunscreens.

Soon after, Tower 28 came under fire for claiming its mineral sunscreen SOS FaceGuard SPF 30 left no white cast, even on deep skin tones, but the faces of content creators, notably cosmetic chemist and consultant Julian Sass, showed that not to be the case. In response, Tower 28 founder and CEO Amy Liu issued an apology on social media and said the brand would remove the words “no white cast” and “universal tint” from marketing, reformulate the product, enhance its testing approach to standardize use across participants, and collaborate with experts and chemists to ensure that future releases serve its diverse community.

Earlier this month, buzzy Australian brand Ultra Violette became the latest subject of sunscreen controversy when Australian consumer advocacy group Choice received SPF ratings of 4 and 5 in independent tests of its Lean Screen SPF 50+ Mattifying Zinc Skinscreen. Choice tested 19 other sunscreens, including from popular brands Banana Boat, Bondi Sands, Neutrogena and Sun Bum. Sixteen out of the 20 tested had SPFs lower than advertised, but Lean Screen garnered the lowest SPF ratings out of the group.

Publicly releasing its testing of Lean Screen, Ultra Violette, which entered the United States across all Sephora doors in March, reacted by sharing that it tested the product in 2021 and 2024 to meet standards set by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The brand conducted a 10-person panel test on the same batch of products in Choice’s independent testing and arrived at an SPF of 61.7. It challenged the decanting of its sunscreen in Choice’s tests—or its placement in amber glass jars—and whether it was properly labeled.

In a statement on its website, Ultra Violette wrote, “We rigorously retest our entire SPF range every two years. Lean Screen has been on the market for 5 years in 29 countries and we have not received a single substantiated claim of sunburn during use – reinforcing our confidence in the testing we have.”

Facing sharp criticism from Ultra Violette fans, Choice also made its testing available online. In a statement on its site, Choice CEO Ashley de Silva stood by the organization’s results and emphasized it had operated in strict accordance with sunscreen standards in Australia and New Zealand and tapped accredited laboratories for testing like Eurofins Dermatest.

The statement read, “We believe the discrepancy between our test results and those provided by manufacturers warrants further investigation by the TGA. We are calling for a compliance review, including independent testing of the mean SPF for, at least, the sunscreens that did not meet their label claims in our commissioned tests.”

Against the backdrop of these sunscreen scandals, for this edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked 10 cosmetic chemists and brand founders the following: What steps should sunscreen brands take to maintain consumer trust?