How to Rebuild Trust in Sunscreen After #SunscreenGate

The scandal that began with a single failed SPF test in Australia has left consumers questioning the bottle on their bathroom shelf. We asked Frances van der Velden, founder of Australian brand Airyday, how a sunscreen brand earns that confidence back, and why the country with the world's strictest sunscreen rules is where the lessons are being learned.

If there is one product category that depends entirely on consumers believing the number on the label, it is sunscreen. You cannot see SPF working. You cannot feel whether a formula is delivering 50 or delivering four. You apply it, you go outside, and you trust that the protection you paid for is the protection you are getting. In 2025 that trust took a serious knock, and the aftershocks are still being felt across the sun care market well into this year.

The episode quickly earned the nickname SunscreenGate, and for the brands caught up in it the damage went far beyond a single recall. It raised an uncomfortable question for the whole industry about who really stands behind the claims on a bottle. To understand how a brand rebuilds confidence from here, it helps to start with what actually happened.

What happened

The scandal traces back to June 2025, when the Australian consumer advocacy group CHOICE published the results of independent testing on 20 popular sunscreens sold across the country, all marketed at SPF 50 or 50+. Using the standard human-volunteer method, in which product is applied to participants' skin and exposed to measured doses of UV light, CHOICE found that 16 of the 20 failed to meet their stated SPF. The single worst result was the one that made headlines around the world. Ultra Violette's Lean Screen SPF 50+ returned readings as low as SPF 4, a fraction of what the label promised.

Ultra Violette initially disputed the findings and published its own testing, but the product was later voluntarily recalled and its listing on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods cancelled. CHOICE, for its part, repeated the test on a different batch at a German laboratory and reported almost identical results, which made the figures very difficult to wave away as a one-off testing quirk.

Many of the affected products were built on the same white-labelled base formulation, manufactured by Wild Child Laboratories in Western Australia. Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration, the regulator responsible for sunscreens, eventually flagged 21 products that relied on that base, supplied across roughly 17 different companies. Preliminary TGA testing indicated the base formulation was unlikely to deliver an SPF greater than 21, despite sitting inside products labelled 50+.

Crucially, when the TGA carried out a Good Manufacturing Practice inspection of the Wild Child facility, it did not identify manufacturing faults that could explain the low results. Attention instead turned to the testing itself. The regulator raised significant concerns about the reliability of SPF testing carried out by Princeton Consumer Research Corp, a UK-based laboratory used by many of the brands relying on the base formulation to support their SPF claims. The TGA wrote to the laboratory and, by its own account, did not receive a response. The laboratory has defended its methods elsewhere, pointing to variability in manufacturing, storage and the grade of zinc oxide used.

By the time the TGA completed the first phase of its investigation in December 2025, the tally was stark. Eight of the 21 products had been recalled or had manufacture ceased, ten more had sales suspended, and a small number remained under review. Wild Child halted production of the base formula. A separate round of recalls followed in early 2026 over formula separation issues, unrelated to the original SPF failures but landing on an already nervous public.

The effect on consumers

It is hard to overstate why this lands so heavily in Australia specifically. The country has the highest rates of skin cancer and melanoma in the world. Roughly two in three Australians will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer in their lifetime, and close to 19,000 melanoma diagnoses were estimated in a single recent year.

Against that backdrop, the news that trusted SPF 50+ products might be delivering a quarter of their promised protection was, for many people, genuinely frightening. One academic described the CHOICE review as a hold-on-to-your-hat moment that eroded the premium protection narrative the category had built up over years. The phrase that has stuck among commentators is a trust deficit. When the TGA opened a public consultation on reforming sunscreen regulation in March 2026, restoring consumer confidence was named as the central objective, an admission in itself of how much had been lost.

For brands, that deficit shows up in real ways; shoppers reading recall lists and cross-checking the products in their own cabinets. Heightened scepticism towards any superlative claim. A new willingness to ask who actually tested a formula and where. The category had relied on the label being taken on faith, and that faith is now conditional. Rebuilding it is the work facing every responsible brand, including those that were never implicated at all.

Starting with honesty

Frances van der Velden founded the Australian brand Airyday and watched the crisis unfold from inside the category, though her own products were not caught up in the recalls. Her starting point for rebuilding trust is disarmingly straightforward.

I think you start by being really honest and really human about it. Airyday wasn't impacted by any of the recalls or issues, but it was still a really hard time for every brand in the sunscreen category. The consumer anxiety was massive and I completely understood why. Sunscreen is something people rely on every day, so when that trust is shaken, it becomes much bigger than just a product issue as people were worried about what they were putting on their own skin.

Part of what made the episode so corrosive, she argues, was not only the failures themselves but the way information reached the public in fragments.

What made it so difficult was that the issue was really layered, but it wasn't communicated that way. Pieces of information were coming out, but nothing that told the full story, so consumers were left trying to make sense of something very complex, only further adding to their anxiety.

For Airyday, the response was to act before being asked to, and to treat customer questions as conversations rather than complaints to be managed.

For us, the first step was to look at what we could do proactively. We reviewed our own products, commenced additional testing and looked at other measures that could help give our customers and ourselves that extra peace of mind. We also started looking more closely at newer testing methods, like plate testing, because I do think this is where the industry needs to keep evolving.

But a big part of rebuilding trust also came down to having direct conversations with our consumers. We had customers emailing us who were worried and we wanted to answer them properly. We explained what we understood had happened and what we were doing proactively. Our goal was to help them to see why we & they should still have confidence in our products.

For van der Velden, the stakes are real, and she brings a personal history to the question of whether a sunscreen does what it says.

Having had skin cancer myself, this is not something I take lightly. Knowing that our products work is genuinely my number one priority.

Owning what is in the bottle

One of the structural lessons of SunscreenGate is the risk that comes when a large part of a category leans on the same outsourced base. Airyday formulates and manufactures its own products, but van der Velden is careful not to turn that into a blunt verdict on every brand that does things differently.

I think brands absolutely need to own what's in their bottles, whether the formula is their own custom IP, white-labelled or maybe it's somewhere in between. You can outsource parts of the process, but you cannot outsource the responsibility.

For us, formulating our own products has always been really important because it means we are closer to every part of the product. But I also won't pretend it's the easy path. It is incredibly difficult and expensive, especially in Australia.

And it’s this difficulty that pushes brands towards ready-made bases in the first place, which is exactly how a single formulation can end up under so many different labels.

The regulations are there for very good reasons. The strictness gives control and confidence because sunscreen has a serious job, but it can also make it very hard for brands to build something from scratch and so naturally it pushes brands towards these ready-to-go bases, where much of the work is done for them and the pathway to market is quicker and more commercially realistic.

The risk is that when too many brands rely on the same base, any issue can spread very quickly across the category, which we have now seen. But even with that, I still don't think this should be simplified to 'white label is bad'. There are good manufacturers, formulators and responsible brands working in that model.

Her conclusion is less about blame and more about where the system itself needs to move next.

What we need to recognise is that the current system can make these models commercially appealing. Regulation needs to keep standards high, but it also needs to keep evolving bringing in better checks for different models and frameworks that support innovation rather than making it harder. Because really, the more people we can get using sunscreen, the better!

Why Australia's rules are the strictest in the world

To understand both the crisis and the path out of it, it helps to understand why Australia regulates sunscreen so differently from much of the rest of the world. In the UK, sunscreens are largely treated as cosmetics. In Australia, a product whose main purpose is sun protection is a therapeutic good, regulated in much the same category as medicines. That classification shapes everything downstream, from permitted ingredients to how a claim can be made.

Therapeutic sunscreens generally have to be entered on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods before they can be sold, may only use active ingredients drawn from a TGA-approved list, and must meet the testing and labelling requirements of the Australian sunscreen standard. The regulator can pull any listed product off the market to check it is safe, of suitable quality and only making approved claims.

Van der Velden points to a distinction within that framework that she feels is poorly understood outside Australia, and which goes to the heart of how seriously a dedicated sunscreen is treated.

One of the biggest differences in Australia is that sunscreens are split into primary and secondary sunscreens, which is something I think is less understood outside of Australia.

A primary sunscreen is a product where sun protection is the main purpose of the product. This means a dedicated face/body sunscreen or SPF product like ours would generally sit in that category. In Australia, primary sunscreens are regulated as therapeutic goods (medical) and is not classified as a cosmetic product. So from a formulation point of view, you are not just creating a beauty product with SPF in it. You are creating something that sits within a much more controlled, pharmaceutical-style framework.

A secondary sunscreen is completely different. For the Australian regulation, this means a cosmetic product where SPF is a secondary benefit, rather than the main purpose. For example, a moisturiser, foundation, primer or lip product that also contains SPF. These products are rarely tested for SPF efficacy as it's not required & how these products are manufactured sit under a simpler pathway.

That split matters enormously for the level of scrutiny a product faces, and for the discipline required of whoever makes it.

That distinction of primary vs secondary SPF formulas is important because it changes the level of responsibility around the product. With a primary sunscreen, there are checks across the entire process end to end - the permitted ingredients you can use, the SPF claim you are making, the way the product is tested, manufactured, labelled and supplied. It is much more controlled than a standard cosmetic product and it leaves no room to simply change things along the way. Even small formulation or manufacturing changes can have bigger implications because the finished product has to remain aligned with what was registered and tested.

As a result, formulating does become a lot slower and more challenging, but it also gives confidence in the product you are using.

Where the category goes next

The uncomfortable lesson of SunscreenGate is that even the strictest regime in the world did not catch the problem first. A consumer group did. The gap, as the investigation made clear, was not in Australia's rules about ingredients or claims, but in the reliability of the SPF testing that those claims rested on, much of it carried out overseas and submitted by manufacturers rather than independently verified. It is why CHOICE has pressed the regulator to conduct its own compliance testing rather than relying on industry-supplied reports, and why the TGA's 2026 consultation puts testing standards and laboratory oversight at its centre.

For brands, the immediate work is to communicate clearly when the picture is complicated rather than waiting for it to resolve, answering worried customers properly rather than deflecting, and being able to show genuine ownership of a formula from the ingredients in through the testing out. The number on the label only means something if the consumer believes the brand behind it stands fully behind it. Earning that back, as van der Velden makes plain, is slow and expensive work. After SunscreenGate, it is also the only work that counts.