A team of scientists takes advantage of nanoparticle and is developing a novel sunscreen with better skin protection character. And now the product design has been finished and the tests on animals were successful but yet to be permitted to test on human.

Sunblock products are widely used by people enjoying sunshine and outdoor activities. But a great part of such products in the market make use of chemicals to get rid of the UV rays and decrease the damage they pose to skin. But the chemicals are possible to penetrate into skin and furtherly go into bodies, which is one of the concerns many people hold as there are such chemicals found in urine and breast milk in related tests. Besides, common sunblock can’t last longer than hours and some of them can only last for two hours. It’s very inconvenient and a limitation of the present sunblock. To address the safety issue and make the sunblock function for a longer time, the new type of sunblock was conceived.

The novel sunscreen applied nanoparticle to prevent the chemicals from getting into body and make damage to health. Chemical UV filters are contained in the nanoparticle. And the particles are designed to prefer protein rich surfaces like skin to ensure they can stay on skin and achieve sun block.

The sunblock has been tested on mice that were shaved off furs. One group was applied with the nanoparticle sunblock, while the other group sprayed with a common sunscreen. Then all of the mice were exposed to UV light. Result showed equivalent sun block effects from the two types of sunscreen. But the nanoparticle sunblock is waterproof and can last as long as five days while keeping no obvious cut in its sun protect ability.

Everything is covered in the design process. It won’t be very difficult to make the nanoparticle sunblock off bodies. It can be easily achieved by the use of towel. But the issue that what to do to keep the nanoparticle from damaging environment is yet remained to be addressed and scientists are working on the problem to provide a sunblock safe both to human bodies and the environment.

Once all issues are settled and it can be marketed to people, the nanoparticle sunblock will be the best choice among its kind.

The study paper was published in the Science with the DOI number being 10.1126/science.aad4638.