An Australian-owned skincare company's admitted making unsubstantiated claims about the level of protection in two of its sunscreen products.
The Commerce Commission opened an investigation into Ego Pharmaceuticals following Consumer NZ testing in 2019. The watchdog filed with the commission.
Commerce Commission general manager of fair trading Vanessa Horne said Ego Pharmaceuticals accepted it did not have a reasonable basis to make SPF claims on the sunscreen products.
It was alleged that Ego Sunsense Sensitive Invisible SPF50+ and Ego Sunsense Ultra SPF50+ failed to provide the very high protection it claimed.
Consumer NZ chief executive Jon Duffy said that at the time of the testing, Ego Pharmaceuticals' test results showed the sunscreens met their claimed SPF.
However, both certificates were from AMA Laboratories (a sunscreen testing facility in US) where in 2021 the owner admitted defrauding customers and causing sunscreens to be marketed with false SPF levels.
“In 2019 and 2020 Ego represented that both products provided ‘very high’ protection for consumers and were ‘SPF50+’ in accordance with an Australian and New Zealand Standard for sunscreen products," Horne said.
"While it had reasonable grounds for those claims when the products were first released in New Zealand, the accumulation of test results between 2017 and 2019 meant that from February 2019 Ego ceased to have reasonable grounds to make those claims.”
The Ego products have not been distributed in New Zealand market since December 2019.
The company will be sentenced in October.
The SPF claims made by Ego were made with reference to the Australian and New Zealand Standard which specifies classification, performance and marketing requirement, the commission said.
This standard is commonly adopted in New Zealand and any compliance with sunscreen standard has been voluntary up until September 7 2022.
The new sunscreen standard
On September 8 2022, a new mandatory safety standard for sunscreen supplied in New Zealand comes into force.
This will mean a sunscreen product cannot be supplied in New Zealand unless it meets the standard requirements.
Sunscreens will be regulated under the Fair Trading Act (FTA) and companies that breach the requirements face fines up to $600,000.
Consumer believes the regulation of sunscreen under FTA should only be an interim measure and sunscreens should be regulated as a therapeutic product (not cosmetic), bringing New Zealand in line with Australia.
Duffy says that complying with the standard isn't enough,
"Sunscreens need to be tested regularly to ensure different batches provide the claimed protection, which the standard doesn’t require," he said.
"Consumer has been testing sunscreens for many years and finds companies are sometimes relying on tests that are several years old to support their label claims.”
Every year, Consumer tests independent sunscreens and in the latest round of testing only eight of the 21 met their SPF label claim and requirements for broad-spectrum protection.
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