You might be surprised to hear about the launch of a sunscreen by a company currently known for its infant feeding gear and adult water bottles. But if you know much about Think Operations, you won't be very surprised at all. A quick glance at ZRecs Guide listings for thinkbaby and thinksport products should make it clear that we're pretty impressed with everything we've seen - the 750 ml double-walled Thinksport bottle and game-changing BPA-free feeding set, which now has its best components sold as separates as well (you can find both of them in the ZRecs Guide). And the company does its research, and then some; thinksport water bottles were among the latest on the market with colors, because of their exacting paint requirements (they are now available in blue, green and purple as well as their original black and silver), and thinkbaby infant feeding bottles have not just BPA testing behind them but broader biological testing to verify the nature and quality of materials they're using.

We were excited to try out Think's new sunscreen, which has been in the works for roughly a year now. The zinc oxide-based sunscreen is sold in 3 oz. bottles branded as both thinkbaby sunscreen and thinksport sunscreen, on the logic that both athletes and parents care more than the average consumer about what they put in, and on, their bodies, and those they care for.

Ingredients

The ingredient list may come as something of a shock for consumers familiar with sunscreens rich with long-named chemicals; in fact, it reads more like the lists you'd find in a natural skin product, full of Latin and common plant names.

Active Ingredient: Zinc Oxide 25%. Inactive Ingredients: Distilled buffered water, vegetable glycerine, whole leaf aloe vera (Barbadensis) gel, Persea Gratissima (Avocado) Oil, Rubus Idaeus (Raspberry) Seed Oil, Doucus Carota, Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil, Oryza sativa, oryzinol, Olea Uropaea (Olive) Fruit Oil, cetaeryl glucoside, phosphatidyl choline (not soy lecithin) Lactoperoxidase, Glucose oxidase, aribinogalactan, arginine, vitamin E (Tocophero), vitamin C (ascorbic acid) Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Peel Wax, Beeswax, Boswellia carteri, Potassium sorbate, rosemary (Rosmarinus Officinalis), cornstarch (Zea Mays), Maranta Arundinacea Root, Carageenan (Chondus crispus).

The sunscreen scored a 1 out of 10 for potential health hazards in the Environmental Working Group's annual sunscreen rankings. It uses no PEGs, not even sneaky ones from "natural" sources.

Equally impressive is this sunscreen's avoidance of nanomaterials. Many sunscreens use undeclared nano-sized active ingredients (titanium dioxide). Think's sunscreen uses zinc oxide with particle sizes over 100 microns.

Performance

The biggest question we had prior to receiving samples of thinkbaby/thinksport sunscreen was whether it would rub in cleanly or leave your skin ghostly white. But zinc oxide usage has come a long way since the white-nosed characters from 1980s beach comedies. With titanium dioxide, the main way companies have made it "invisible" on the skin is by using the ingredient at nanoparticle sizes. We have serious concerns about the use of nanoparticles in skin products, and recommend against them.

Think sunscreen does apply a bit differently from other sunscreens, which we consider par for the course for a product that has gone through this kind of reinvention. It has a slight tackiness or chalkiness to it, more like traditional zinc oxide sunscreens than like nano titanium dioxide sunscreens. You have to rub it into the skin to make its white color disappear. It does virtually disappear when rubbed in, although it leaves a very slight, faint, paleness - pale enough that you probably can't make it out in these photos.

Here's a small application of the thinksport-branded sunscreen on our daughter Z's arm.


And here's how it looks after rubbing it in.

Protection

Think's sunscreen has an SPF rating of 30+; as Julie Deardorff at the Chicago Tribune, among others, has reported, there has been a surge in sunscreens with dubious claims of SPF of 50 and above. More importantly, thinksport and thinkbaby sunscreen strikes a balance between UVA and UVB protection that should be checked in any sunscreen you intend to use. Some sunscreens with a high SPF have most of that protection in one form of UV light, leaving you more exposed to the other than you realize.

It is also very long-lasting. The FDA is putting guidelines into place that will ban the use of the term "waterproof," as it encourages users to go too long without reapplying sunscreen. But we have used this sunscreen at the beach, at swimming pools, and sweating out in the hot sun, and have noticed that it seems to remain on the skin for quite a while and through a lot of activity.

Price and competition

Think's new sunscreen retails for $16.99 for a three-ounce tube. This is comparable to Badger ($16 for 2.9 oz.), whose own mineral-based sunscreen scores well in EWG's assessments and another of our favorites. Consumers know that natural, mineral blocking sunscreens are more expensive than chemically protective sunscreens, which means the reapplication rate becomes the final judge of value. A $17 sunscreen that lasts several hours in one application is a better value than something that costs less per ounce but has to be applied every hour or two to protect your skin. Again, we feel neither qualified nor licensed to make any claims about how long this or any sunscreen lasts, but our own experience has us applying this sunscreen less frequently during an outing than some others we've used.

Many "natural" sunscreens rule themselves out of our safety book based on their reliance on nano-sized titanium dioxide. This material is euphemistically referred to as "sunscreen-grade" on ingredient labels, but that means the ingredient is used in the sunscreen at sizes less than 100 microns in size, which has potential health risks that are still being studied.

For more quick sunscreen recommendations, check out the ZRecs Guide's section on safer sunscreens. Please note that TruKid's Sunny Days sunscreen, one of our standbys last year and a product we still highly recommend, still is; its listing in EWG's Skin Deep database is out of date and includes several ingredients not in the sunscreen's current formulation.

You can buy thinkbaby sunscreen and thinksport sunscreen directly from thinkbaby and thinksport.