Update Feb. 28, 2019 — This blog post explores Stream2Sea’s initial formulation and development process. Product testing occurred only in 2015, when a safe formula was created, and is not ongoing.
When I started Stream2Sea, I thought we’d have products showing up in shops by May because, well… that’s when people usually start buying our mineral sunscreen! However, it didn’t play out that way. We probably won’t launch now until late June.
Because I want to be transparent with you, let me tell you why.
Our first shampoos, which I formulated to Whole Foods’ premium standards using what the industry considers very safe ingredients, failed our first aquatic toxicity trials. I had to go back to step one and reformulate our products from scratch. I also teamed up with some brilliant academics and students at my alma mater, Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Then, things started to progress in leaps and bounds.
As it turns out, no one has ever really carried out the kind of skin care product testing that we believe needs to be done before we are able to call a skin care product ‘reef safe’. In fact, it’s such a new idea that there were no guidelines on how to test consumer products in aquatic ecosystems. Even developing a reasonable exposure was a learning curve. Students working with Dr. Denise Flaherty ended up measuring an average handful of shampoo, and estimating the number of gallons in a bath full of water, before reducing it back down to millilitres of shampoo and litres of water in a fish tank.
These students were so passionate about the process that they actually cheered when every single fish was still alive after 96 hours of swimming in the shampoo-laced foamy water.
Our sunscreen tests are even more important because researchers have exposed the diabolical effect of very low concentrations of common ingredients. Our first tests were 100% successful at the highest dose, the equivalent of one ounce of sunscreen in three full baths of water. However, we still don’t know if fish will react the same way as the more vulnerable coral larva, so we’ll begin another set of tests this summer.
Dr. Koty Sharp, who has been working with the Smithsonian Institute to examine how coral larva ‘choose’ a substrate to settle on, will take a team of students to Mote Marine’s Tropical Research Station on Florida’s Summerland Key where they’ll harvest coral and bring it back to their labs. They’ll capture the coral larva and place them in tanks to see if they remain healthy at the maximum imaginable concentrations of sunscreen.
For now, we’re content enough with our first rounds of skin care product testing, including biodegradability and initial aquatic toxicity, to begin production in the next few weeks, but we’ll hold off labelling our products as reef safe. It’s the eco-conscious thing to do!
Thank you for continuing to join us on this journey, because we DO have a choice and we WILL choose to do better. We appreciate your comments, concerns and questions, and we’ll keep sharing important information and news with you as we go.