Our pick is Black Girl Sunscreen Vanilla Crème SPF 30, because the maker’s own product page lists it as vegan as well as cruelty-free. The surprise is Sun Bum. Its Original SPF 70 Sunscreen Lotion page lists water resistance, cruelty free, gluten free and Hawaii Act 104 compliance, and the section we read doesn’t use the word vegan.
Why cruelty free on the front isn’t enough
Cruelty free and vegan answer two different questions. Cruelty free is about whether the product or its ingredients were tested on animals. Vegan is about whether anything in the bottle came from an animal in the first place. A sunscreen can carry the first claim in good faith and still be thickened with beeswax or softened with lanolin, so a bottle that only says cruelty free hasn’t yet told you the thing you picked it up to find out.
Our guide to telling whether a beauty product is vegan covers the general method. This page applies it to sunscreen, where the animal ingredients sit in one fairly predictable part of the formula, and where the front of the pack is busy with other promises.
One thing up front about how the picks were made. We didn’t wear either sunscreen on a beach, we didn’t run a water test, and we measured nothing. The selection comes from reading what each maker says about its own product, and the flaws listed below come from the same pages and from what those pages leave out. Research-based picks are what this is, and you should read them as that.
What makes a sunscreen not vegan
Start with the reassuring part. The UV filters are not where the problem sits. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are minerals. Avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate and octocrylene are synthetic chemicals made in a lab, and none of them comes from an animal.
The animal ingredients live in the base, among the waxes, oils, emollients and colorants that turn a filter into something you can actually spread on skin. Here is what to look for, roughly in the order you’ll meet it.
Beeswax shows up on an ingredient panel as cera alba. It gives a solid stick its shape and a balm its slip, which makes solid formats the ones to read most carefully.
Lanolin is the grease that comes off sheep’s wool, refined into an emollient. It belongs to the world of lip products, and a lip balm with an SPF on it is still a lip balm underneath.
Carmine (E120) is a red pigment made from cochineal insects. Tinted sunscreens get their color from pigments, and where a tint leans pink or red, carmine is one way to get there. Iron oxides, which are mineral, are the other.
Shellac, the resin secreted by lac insects, is used as a film former in some cosmetics. It is less likely to be your problem in a lotion than in a nail product, and our piece on whether shellac is vegan goes through it properly.
Squalane is the slippery one, in both senses. It was historically taken from shark liver oil, and it is now also made from olives and sugarcane. The ingredient name is identical whichever source it came from, so the panel alone can’t settle it.
Stearic acid and glycerin have the same problem on a smaller scale. Both can be made from animal fat or from plant oils, and the label won’t say which. Guanine, a pearly shimmer sometimes added to give skin a glow, has traditionally been made from fish scales. Collagen, honey and propolis are animal-derived with no ambiguity at all.
None of these is a UV filter. All of them are formulation choices, which is why two sunscreens with identical filters can land on opposite sides of the line.
The picks, and the flaw in each
Black Girl Sunscreen Vanilla Crème SPF 30
This is the one we’d reach for. Its product page lists it as Cruelty-Free and Vegan, in those words. On this site, a manufacturer’s own statement is the strongest basis for a provenance call short of the label in your hand, and here the word is plainly there.
What the passage we read doesn’t do is name a certification scheme behind the word vegan. Treat it as the maker’s statement rather than an audited mark. That still puts you ahead of a bottle that says nothing, because you aren’t inferring anything.
The flaw is how little else we can tell you. The section of the page we read for this article carries those two words and nothing about fragrance, skin type or the full inactive list, and the product name, Vanilla Crème, raises a question about added scent that the passage doesn’t answer.
Two readers should skip it, or at least hold off. If you avoid added fragrance in anything that goes on your face, read the panel on the bottle before you buy, because nothing we read rules a scent in or out. And if you want a vegan claim backed by a named certifier rather than the maker’s own word, this page doesn’t give you one.
SPF 30 is the number on this bottle. If you specifically want a higher number on the label, this isn’t your pick, and the next one is.
We haven’t put a price here. Check it on the day you buy.
Sun Bum Original SPF 70 Sunscreen Lotion
Sun Bum is here as a conditional pick, and the condition is the whole reason it’s on the page.
The Original SPF 70 product page lists the lotion as water resistant for 80 minutes, cruelty free, gluten free, and Hawaii Act 104 compliant, made without oxybenzone and octinoxate. Those are real claims, and some readers will want every one of them. None of them is the claim you came for.
Cruelty free covers testing. Gluten free covers gluten. The Hawaii line covers two named chemical filters. A lotion could meet all of those and still contain beeswax, lanolin or an animal-sourced emollient, and the section of the page we read doesn’t rule any of that out. It doesn’t confirm any of it either. It simply doesn’t speak to the question.
Before you buy it, then, turn the bottle over and read the inactive ingredients against the list in the section above. If the panel is clean, it suits someone who wants the higher SPF number and the water-resistance claim the page makes, which the Black Girl Sunscreen bottle doesn’t offer at SPF 70. If you need the maker to say vegan in writing before something goes in your basket, skip Sun Bum and buy the Black Girl Sunscreen bottle instead.
The other downside is one nobody can read off a web page. Formulations change, and a clean panel on one bottle is a clean panel on that bottle. If you rebuy next summer, read it again.
Is beeswax a dealbreaker?
Vegans disagree here, and no ingredient list will settle it, because it’s a question about where the line sits rather than what is in the jar.
The strict position runs like this. Beeswax is made by bees and taken from the hive. Veganism means not using animal products where a workable alternative exists, and in a sunscreen stick the alternatives are obvious: candelilla wax, carnauba wax and plant butters all do the same thickening job. Choosing beeswax when they exist is choosing an animal product for no reason, and the size of the animal doesn’t change that.
The permissive position is that bee products sit in a different category from meat, dairy or leather. The harm per gram is tiny, the animals are insects, and refusing a sunscreen you actually need over a few percent of wax in the base costs a person something real for a gain that is hard to see. On that view, the energy is better spent elsewhere.
The site’s line is that beeswax counts as not vegan. A sunscreen containing it won’t be recommended here and goes on the skip list below. If you draw the line elsewhere, everything else on this page still works for you; strike beeswax off your own skip list and carry on.
Which sunscreens to skip
Skip any solid stick or balm with cera alba on the panel. Solid formats need a wax to hold their shape, and beeswax is the traditional one, so these are the bottles where reading takes ten seconds and saves the most.
An SPF lip balm deserves two checks rather than one, because it can carry lanolin and beeswax together. If either appears, put it back.
Tinted sunscreens get one specific check. Look for carmine, or the word cochineal. If the tint comes from iron oxides alone, the color isn’t the problem, and you can move on to the rest of the panel.
Be wary of squalane, stearic acid or glycerin on a bottle that doesn’t say vegan anywhere. These aren’t automatic skips. They’re a reason to email the maker and ask which source they use, and to buy something else in the meantime if you’re standing in the shop.
A bottle that says only cruelty free isn’t a skip either. It’s a read-first, for the reasons Sun Bum illustrates above.
Then there’s “reef safe” and “reef friendly”. Whatever those phrases mean on a given bottle, they are about filters and the ocean. They tell you nothing about beeswax, lanolin or carmine, so don’t let a reef claim stand in for a vegan one.
Mineral or chemical filters: does it change anything?
For vegan status, no. Mineral sunscreens use zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, chemical sunscreens use synthetic filters, and both kinds of filter are animal-free. The difference is what surrounds them.
If anything, mineral formats are worth a slightly closer look when they come as thick creams, balms and sticks, because those are the textures that call for wax. A thin chemical lotion has less reason to reach for beeswax, though it can still carry lanolin or an animal-derived emollient. Either way, the filter type is not the shortcut. The base is where you read.
How to check a bottle yourself
The method is the same whichever bottle you’re holding, and it takes about as long as reading the price sticker.
- Turn the bottle over and find the inactive ingredients, which sit apart from the active ones on the panel.
- Skip past the actives. Those are the filters, and they won’t be your problem.
- Read every line of the inactive ingredients against the list earlier on this page, looking for cera alba, lanolin, carmine, cochineal, guanine, collagen, honey and propolis.
- Note any squalane, stearic acid or glycerin, and if the maker doesn’t say vegan anywhere, ask them which source they use.
- Look on the pack and on the maker’s product page for the word vegan itself, or for a vegan certification mark.
That last step needs one caution about logos. Before you let a mark stand in for the word vegan, look it up on the certifier’s own site and read what it actually covers.
If you want to go further, the maker’s own product page is the next stop after the label. It’s where the Black Girl Sunscreen claim came from, and it’s where you’ll find out whether a brand is willing to put the word vegan in writing.
Who should buy neither
Some readers won’t be served by either pick, and it’s better to say so than to push one of them on you.
If you want the maker’s written vegan statement and you also avoid fragrance, neither bottle is a pick for you yet. Black Girl Sunscreen gives you the first, and what we read says nothing either way about scent. Sun Bum’s page, in the section we read, gives you neither. Take the checking method above to the shelf and hold out for a bottle whose panel you’ve read yourself.
If you want SPF 70 and a maker who says vegan in writing, the same thing applies. Sun Bum has the number, the passage we read doesn’t have the word, and Black Girl Sunscreen has the word at SPF 30.
The same label-reading carries over to the rest of the bag, and our roundup of vegan drugstore makeup brands applies it to foundation and lipstick. For sunscreen, buy the Black Girl Sunscreen bottle unless you need SPF 70, and turn every bottle that only says cruelty free over before it goes in the basket.
