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Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US

>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.

You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.

If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.

calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis

Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese. We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards

I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here

regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall

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The flipside of this is that companies put dangerous chemicals into food, cookware, etc. Not convinced things would be better on net.
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More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.
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