Why môme care® formulations are sunscreen-free?

This is choice we made when we established the specifications of our products and decided on the values of môme care®.

All our products are:

① Allergen-free

② Free of harmful ingredients

③ Organic

④ Natural

⑤ Sourced from France

We believe that this hierarchy of priorities insures the best quality and safety for the daily care of the skin of your children and teens.

The article below from EWG.org clearly highlights the risk of sunscreen formulations and the need to use them as your last resort.

The Trouble With Ingredients in Sunscreens (source: EWG.org)

Sunscreen is a unique body care product: consumers are directed to apply a thick coat over large areas of the body and reapply frequently. Thus, ingredients in sunscreen should not be irritating or cause skin allergies and should be able to withstand powerful UV radiation without losing their effectiveness or forming potentially harmful breakdown products. People can potentially inhale ingredients in sunscreen sprays and ingest some of the ingredients they apply to their lips, so ingredients must not be harmful to lungs or internal organs. Further, sunscreens commonly include ingredients that act as “penetration enhancers” and help the product adhere to skin. As a result, many sunscreen chemicals are absorbed into the body and can be measured in blood, breast milk and urine samples.

Active ingredients in sunscreens come in two forms, mineral and chemical filters. Each uses a different mechanism for protecting skin and maintaining stability in sunlight. The most common sunscreens on the market contain chemical filters. These products typically include a combination of two to six of the following active ingredients: oxybenzone, avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, homosalate and octinoxate. Mineral sunscreens use zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide. A handful of products combine zinc oxide with chemical filters.

Laboratory studies indicate that some chemical UV filters may mimic hormones, and physicians report sunscreen-related skin allergies, which raises important questions about unintended human health consequences from frequent sunscreen application.

The Food and Drug Administration has not reviewed evidence of potential hazards of sunscreen filters – instead it grandfathered in ingredients used in the late 1970s when it began to consider sunscreen safety. The Danish EPA recently reviewed the safety of active ingredients in sunscreen and concluded that most ingredients lacked information to ensure their safety (Danish EPA 2015). Sixteen of the 19 ingredients studied had no information about their potential to cause cancer. And while the published studies suggest that several chemical filters interact with human sex or thyroid hormones, none of the ingredients had sufficient information to determine the potential risks to humans from hormone disruption.

EWG has reviewed the existing data about human exposure and toxicity for the nine most commonly used sunscreen chemicals. The most worrisome is oxybenzone, which was added to nearly 65 percent of the non-mineral sunscreens in EWG’s 2018 sunscreen database. Oxybenzone can cause allergic skin reactions (Rodriguez 2006). In laboratory studies it is a weak estrogen and has potent anti-androgenic effects (Krause 2012, Ghazipura 2017).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention routinely detects oxybenzone in more than 96 percent of the American population. Study participants who reported using sunscreen have higher oxybenzone exposures (Zamoiski 2015). Investigators at University of California, Berkeley, recently reported a dramatic drop in teen girls’ exposure to oxybenzone in cosmetics when they switched from their usual products to replacements that did not contain this chemical (Harley 2016).

In a recent evaluation of CDC-collected exposure data for American children, researchers found that adolescent boys with higher oxybenzone measurements had significantly lower total testosterone levels (Scinicariello 2016). The study did not find a similar effect in younger boys or females. The researchers cautioned that their results are a single-day snapshot instead of a controlled study of the effect of multi-day exposures.

Three other studies reported statistically significant associations between oxybenzone exposure during pregnancy and birth outcomes. One reported shorter pregnancies in women gestating male babies, two reported higher birth weights in baby boys, and one found lower birth weights in daughters (Ghazipura 2017).

Intentional dosing studies in people are rare. In one study, human volunteers applied a lotion with oxybenzone and two other sunscreen ingredients. Researchers reported a minor but statistically significant decrease in testosterone in men, accompanied by a minor increase in inhibin B, another male sex hormone (Janjua 2004). The researchers concluded these differences were normal variations and not attributed to sunscreen exposure, but critics argue that the exposures were too short to be conclusive (Krause 2012).

Given the pervasiveness of oxybenzone exposures, further study is needed to evaluate the association between oxybenzone and hormone disruption in children and adults.

EWG recommends that consumers avoid sunscreens with oxybenzone. But sunscreen users are exposed to other active ingredients as well. Margaret Schlumpf of the University of Zurich detected oxybenzone and four other sunscreen filters in Swiss women’s breast milk, indicating that the developing fetus and newborns may be exposed to these substances (Schlumpf 2008, Schlumpf 2010). She detected at least one sunscreen chemical in 85 percent of milk samples.

Some experts caution that the unintentional exposure to and toxicity of active ingredients erode the benefits of sunscreens (Krause 2012, Schlumpf 2010). But most experts conclude that more sensitive tests are needed to determine whether sunscreen chemical ingredients pose risks to frequent users (Draelos 2010, Gilbert 2013).

 TIPS: Sunscreen Should Be Your Last Resort