At the end of July, a video told several million people that sunscreens cause cancer. It was removed from the platforms after fact-checkers reviewed it. In the meantime, though, a lot of people had believed it.
There is no scientific evidence that sunscreens cause skin cancer. What does exist, and what no one is looking at, is the ground on which that fear took root: twenty years of cosmetics sold with “free from” claims. The industry taught people to be afraid of ingredients, and now that fear has turned against a product that serves a purpose.
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Elisa Avalle · Founder and dermocosmetics specialist
At university, in Barcelona, we called it chemophobia. People in the industry have been talking about it for years. This summer’s case is the point at which it left our conversations and began causing real harm.
Langhe, August 19, 2026
What is chemophobia?
It is fear of chemistry as such, regardless of what is being discussed. It sounds like an academic issue, but it can be measured. A study published in Risk Analysis in 2019 found that most people do not know that natural and synthetic substances are governed by the same toxicological principles, and that the expression “chemical substance” mainly evokes negative associations.
The study identifies two recurring misunderstandings, and they are exactly the ones I encounter every day when reading the comments beneath cosmetics posts: insensitivity to the relationship between dose and effect, and underestimating the toxicity of naturally derived substances. In other words: people think a substance is inherently good or bad, and take it for granted that if it comes from a plant, it cannot be harmful.
It needs to be said clearly: water is chemistry too. The coffee we drink in the morning contains dozens of compounds that would be toxic at different doses. We ourselves are chemistry. The term does not describe a category of dangerous things; it describes everything.
The dose makes the poison, in cosmetics too
The example I always use when someone asks me whether an ingredient “is harmful” is ibuprofen. One tablet gets rid of a headache. Twenty tablets can kill you. Yet no one says ibuprofen is a poison: they say it must be taken at the right dose.
Cosmetics work in exactly the same way, which is why the annexes to Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 exist: lists of permitted substances with the maximum permitted concentration for each one. A few concrete examples:
- phenoxyethanol, one of the most demonized preservatives of all, is permitted up to 1%;
- methylparaben and ethylparaben are permitted up to 0.4% individually and 0.8% in combination;
- propylparaben and butylparaben have a much lower limit, 0.14% as a combined total;
- other parabens, such as isopropylparaben and isobutylparaben, are completely prohibited.
Look closely at that last point, because it dismantles the entire “paraben-free” category: parabens are not all the same. Some are permitted within precise limits, others have stricter limits, and still others are illegal. A label that says “paraben-free” groups them all together and says nothing.
And above all: if an ingredient is permitted in Europe, it is because it has been assessed. Not because no one looked into it.
“Twenty years of ‘free from’ claims taught people to be afraid of a list. Now that fear has reached a product that serves a purpose.”
The “free from” claim is a problem we created ourselves
Here I have to offer some self-criticism as part of the industry, because the responsibility is ours. “Paraben-free,” “silicone-free,” “petrolatum-free”: these are claims that do not describe what a product does; they describe what it does not contain. And to work, they need consumers to believe that the thing in question was dangerous.
It is a mechanism that sells extremely well, and one that a 2025 review on chemophobia describes precisely: phrases such as “chemical-free” or “100% natural” reflect public fears while reinforcing them at the same time, exploiting misunderstandings to increase sales.
Regulation 655/2013, which governs cosmetic claims, requires fairness and honesty precisely for this reason. But the simplest rule is this: if a brand explains what is not inside a product instead of explaining what it does, it probably does not have much to say about what it does. In the cosmetic ingredients guide, I explain how to read an INCI without falling into this trap.
How you get from parabens to sunscreen
The step is shorter than it seems. Someone who has been told for twenty years that cosmetic ingredients are something to fear is already ready to believe that sunscreens are too. You do not need to convince them: you only need to give them permission.
When the video came out at the end of July, the Italian dermatology society responded by reminding people that extrapolating a piece of data while ignoring the conclusions of studies fuels misinformation with serious consequences for health, and that ultraviolet rays are carcinogenic. It also clarified something that is always lost in the debate: no sunscreen blocks 100% of UV radiation. SPF 15 lets about 7% through, SPF 30 about 3%, and SPF 50 about 2%. The advice to use it is not based on its being dangerous, but on the fact that it offers partial protection and therefore needs to be used properly.
Then there was the case of someone who showed the scar from an excised skin cancer, saying they had used sunscreen, as if the second fact explained the first. It is the most common and most convincing logical error there is: two facts that occur one after the other in time are not therefore cause and effect.
If you really want to understand how filters work, I have explained them in detail in chemical and physical sunscreen filters and in sun protection and vitamin D, which is the other area where people are always confused.
The real problem is not that we use too much sunscreen. It is that we forget it
This is the part no one mentioned in the controversy, and the part that matters most to me.
This winter, I was out for a walk. I simply felt like being outdoors, nothing more. At one point I realized that the sun was much stronger than I had expected, the UV index was above 2, and I had absolutely nothing on to protect myself. I suffer from dark spots, and I remember perfectly well spending the rest of the walk feeling anxious.
I had not forgotten sunscreen because I was careless. I had forgotten it because it was winter, and no one thinks about it in winter. The same goes for autumn, and especially the beginning of spring, when the UV index starts rising again while we are still mentally in December.
The 150 or 200 ml bottle is bulky and stays at home. So I did what I do when a problem affects me personally: I formulated a solution. That is how a pocket-sized SPF 50 face sunscreen in a single dose came about, the size of a credit card and as thin as a credit card, designed to fit in a wallet. It contains 2 ml and does not tear: it opens in half with a click of the fingers, and if you do not use it all, you can put it back upright in your pocket without losing any product.
I did not design it to sell more. I designed it because the real problem, the one I see every day, is not that people use too much sun protection: it is that they forget it.
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What I ask, as a formulator
I am not asking anyone to trust me because I have a diploma. I am asking for three much simpler things.
That an ingredient not be judged by its name but by its concentration. It is the difference between one tablet and twenty.
That “free from” stop being a sales argument. Saying what a product does is harder than saying what it does not contain, and that is exactly why it is worth more.
That when faced with something we do not know, we say we do not know. This is the part that makes me angriest. In cosmetics, an enormous amount of nonsense is repeated, and it is almost always repeated by the person making the most noise, not by the person who has studied the issue most thoroughly. Shouting is free. But when it comes to people’s skin, noise has a price.
Elisa Avalle is the founder of LeLang Skin Care, specializing in dermocosmetics at the Universitat de Barcelona. She formulates from the Langhe for Italian pharmacies.
Sources for this article
01 R. Saleh, A. Bearth, M. Siegrist, “Chemophobia” Today: Consumers' Knowledge and Perceptions of Chemicals, Risk Analysis, 39(12), 2019
02 Addressing Chemophobia: Bridging Misconceptions in Food Chemistry, Applied Sciences, 15(11), 2025
03 Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, Annexes III and V · Regulation (EU) No 655/2013 on claims
04 Statement from the board of SIDeMaST, Italian Society of Dermatology and Sexually Transmitted Diseases, July 2026
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