Summer Guide to Mineral Sunscreen | The Reduce Report Review
The Reduce Report’s Summer 2023 Guide to Sunscreen
The Top Line
Pipette sunscreen is the clear winner from the list we reviewed. The sunscreen has best ingredients, baby-friendly formula, limited cast, and a reasonable price point. We thought the other options (aside from La Roche-Posay) were also reasonable mineral sunscreen choices.
The Setup
What are the Brands?
What’s Your Impact?
The gamechanger in mineral sunscreens is the reef-friendly, non-toxic ingredients. Chemicals commonly found in typical drugstore sunscreens cause permanent DNA damage to coral. The key here is to avoid biologically toxic chemicals such as oxybenzone, octinoxate, parabens, phthalates, and avobenzone.
Mineral sunscreens tend to use titanium dioxide and zinc oxide as the active ingredients.
No real savings on packaging, except for Raw Elements, which uses a metal tin.
Why switch?
Better for reefs. Probably better for you. These brands are actively trying to find the best sunscreen ingredients and packaging options for the environment: Hawaiian Tropic uses 25% recycled plastic in its packaging while Pipette bans 2,000 potentially toxic or irritating ingredients, making its formula baby-friendly.
The Money: Most of the sunscreens we reviewed were in a close price range, with ThinkSport taking the most affordable spot. Hawaiian Tropic Milk sunscreen was the next most affordable sunscreen on our list.
The Ingredients: ThinkSport, Pipette, Raw Elements, La Roche-Posay all use non-nano particle active mineral ingredients. Hawaiin Tropics confirms to use the same for its UK formulation — we are waiting to hear back whether that is the same for the US formulation. La Roche Posay contains other questionable ingredients, which we flag in our review. Pipette is baby-safe, making it the clear frontrunner.
The Feel and Cast: (1) Despite a little oiliness, Pipette had the greatest blendability, especially when mixing with foundation. (2) A little greyish, La Roche- Posay has a very thin consistency that helps blend with your own foundation. Leaves a greyish casy. (3) A thinner Hawaiian Tropic Tinted Face Milk was third, though you still need to blend your own foundation as the color is still pale. (4) Hawaiian Tropic Sun Milk is also thin texture but has no tint to help. Leaves a slight cast. (5) ThinkSport and Raw Elements were quite thick and make you work. Raw elements might win a little bit here since it doens’t leave a white cast but man is this stuff thick. Thinksport leaves a white cast.
The Scent: Hawaiian Tropics both have that slightly tropical scent. Raw Elements smells a touch of cocoa/coffee. La Roche-Posay was our least favorite with a chemical scent.
For the win🏁 : Pipette and ThinkSport were unscented.
The Protection: Half of the sunscreens we reviewed were SPF 30: each of the Hawaiian Tropic Milk Tropic Milk and Tinted Face Milk as well as Raw Elements Sunscreen. Hawaiian Tropic has an SPF 50 option which we have not tried or reviewed ourselves.
Pipette, ThinkSport and La Roche-Posay sunscreens boast an SPF 50.
Note: Flagging non-nano zinc oxide for broad spectrum UVA/UVB sun protection. The non-nano part is important — there are studies showing that very small nanoparticles (smaller than 35nm) of uncoated zinc oxide and uncoated titanium dioxide can be harmful to the environment by being toxic to marine life
In Pictures
Cost Breakdown
The Money Report:
Most of the sunscreens we reviewed were in a close price range, with ThinkSport taking the most affordable spot. Hawaiian Tropic Milk sunscreen was the next most affordable sunscreen on our list.
Our Picks:
Pipette sunscreen is the clear winner from the list we reviewed. The sunscreen has best ingredients, baby-friendly formula, limited cast, and a reasonable price point. We thought the other options (aside from La Roche-Posay) were also reasonable mineral sunscreen options.
We're on a mission to reduce our personal carbon footprint with small, hopefully easy, changes in our home to fight against climate change. This means we're looking for products that may be all natural, ideally zero waste, reusable or compostable -- while still being affordable!
