Is Sun Bum Reef Safe: The Definitive Answer

Seven Sun Bum sunscreens are reef safe.

Overview

First, as you may or may not know places like Hawaii, Key West, Palau and Bonaire have banned what they deem non-reef safe sunscreens for sale in their jurisdictions. This is a recent event and you can bet on it there are sure to be more to follow shortly.

Because we spend a lot of time in the tropics we have gotten a lot of questions asking if certain brands are reef safe. Sun Bum sunscreen is one of those brands. This question seems to come up all of the time.

Sun Bum has a really cool vibe to the marketing and packaging. People really seem to like the products. I must say their marketing looks fantastic.

The answer is some of their sunscreens are reef safe. By my count – about seven Sun Bum products are reef safe.

If you are on their website shopping under sunscreen on the left side of the site (as of Dec. 2019) you can sort by “reef friendly” sunscreen. 14 products show up, six are for sure reef safe.

Is this an oversight, I don’t know, but this some of the Sun Bum sunscreens on their own reef safe list include Avobenzone, Octocrylene, Octisalate, and Homosalate. These four ingredients are often listed as needing more study or not likely reef safe.

I actually called them twice to get some clarification. I left two detailed voicemails and I never heard back from them. That tells me a lot.

The five products that are reef safe are their Mineral Sunscreen collection:

Mineral SPF30 Tinted Sunscreen Face Lotion
Mineral SPF30 Sunscreen Lip Balm
Mineral SPF30 Sunscreen Spray
Mineral SPF50 Sunscreen Lotion
Mineral SPF50 Sunscreen Face Stick

These five meet the bill of actually being mineral based as well as reef safe.

Also the Baby Bum SPF50 Mineral Sunscreen Lotion Fragrance Free and the Signature SPF30 Sunscreen Lip Balm are reef safe. The Baby Bum lotion isn’t listed on the reef safe sunscreens, but like I said I did a deep dive into their website to find what is and isn’t reef safe and I found that one is definitely reef safe that wasn’t on their own list.

Except for the products listed above every sunscreen product on their Reef Safe section of their website they have listed in their ingredients:

Avobenzone
Octocrylene
Octisalate
Homosalate

In nearly most of their sunscreen products listed on the Reef Safe page these chemicals are the top four listed ingredients. So basically the foundation for the chemical composition of their sunscreen is based on chemicals that are questionable as to how safe they are for reefs.

Misinformation??

From everything I have read, the two most listed non reef safe chemicals are Oxybenzone and Octinoxate. They apparently have reformulated some of their sunscreens to omit both of these chemicals in some of their line. I still believe some of their products do contain some of these chemicals. Again, this may be old info on the website.

In their own FAQ section Sun Bum says that Oxybenzone is not reef safe, but they completely omit Octinoxate, so I’m not sure they have the entire picture or maybe their website has some errors.

For a full list of chemicals that are not reef safe as well as sunscreens that do not contain these chemicals please see the blog post I have written here. It has the most complete list of reef safe sunscreens on the entire internet as far as I can tell.

I am not saying that Sun Bum is a bad company, people seem to love their products. I’m guessing they have protected hundreds of thousands or even millions of people from sunburn.

What I’m saying is as of this writing most of their products are not in the reef safe category. I will update this post if they change their chemical composition to something reef safe, or if they ever get back to me.

That said, the ones that are reef safe listed above are really good. I have purchased and used almost all of them and would definitely purchase them again.

Are there any other really good sunscreens out there that are reef safe? Yes there are a lot of them out in the marketplace now.

Be Wild

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