What is clear zinc oxide sunscreen?
Clear zinc oxide is a specialized type of mineral zinc oxide powder whose particles have a porous surface texture (like a sea sponge) that doesn’t reflect as much visible light as standard non-Nano Zinc Oxide and is therefore less whitening on the skin. The large particle size of clear zinc oxide gives it the same outstanding safety and efficacy of standard non-nano zinc oxide. It won't absorb into your body, it won't harm the environment, and it provides excellent UVA and UVB protection.
Is clear zinc oxide safe?
Clear zinc oxide is an approved sunscreen UV filter in the US, the EU, and all major international markets and it meets the natural cosmetic standards of the Natural Products Association (USA) and ECOCERT (EU). After a decade reviewing all the published research and conducting our own independent laboratory analyses on clear zinc oxide we’ve determined that it meets our stringent standards for ingredient safety and efficacy and it is completely safe for us to use in our sunscreens and on our families. As of 2022 we now use clear zinc oxide as the only active ingredient in all our sunscreens.
Is clear zinc oxide nano or non-nano?
The top image shows that clear zinc oxide is composed of large particles between about 500 and 9000 nanometers in diameter (5 - 90x larger than nanoparticles). The lower image shows a close up of the zinc oxide crystallites making up the larger particles. You can see that there are no free nanoparticles (which we verified with light scattering analysis). Despite this, and the general acceptance in the USA that clear zinc is non-nano, we have decided not to identify our zinc oxide as non-nano because of the different definitions of nano in some other countries in which we sell our sunscreens. The EU, for example, considers clear zinc oxide to be a nanomaterial because some of the identifiable constituent particles (the little crystallites that make up the larger non-nano particles) are measurable on the nano-scale. But to remind you, there are no detectable free nanoparticles in clear zinc oxide.
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