Consortium by ALT-SPF

The ALT-SPF project brings together twenty-nine partners presenting both, personal care companies as well as laboratories developing alternative SPF tests, located in ten different countries.

The SPF value reflects the level of sunburn protection offered by sun care products and is connected to the protection against DNA damage. The current gold standard for SPF testing, ISO 24444:2019, involves testing on human volunteers. This is the only accepted method, but the procedure is invasive, complex, time consuming, and costly.

The cosmetics industry has been working in the past years to find suitable alternative methods. However, analysing and characterising new methods for public use demands sophisticated analytical tools. Also, comparing alternative SPF data against the gold standard requires a solid set of in vivo SPF data and thus represents a significant experimental effort that should not be repeated for each alternative method.

This is how, in 2018, the idea for the ALT-SPF initiative was born.

Bringing together a critical mass of SPF test users to evaluate new methods

The ALT-SPF consortium seeks to evaluate, characterise and compare alternative SPF methods that are less invasive, more precise, and more cost-effective to the current gold standard, ISO 24444:2019, and to publish the results obtained in peer-reviewed journal(s).