What Do "Reef Safe," "Reef Friendly" and "Reef Conscious" Actually Mean?

The short version, if you're short on time

• None of the three has a legal definition. No U.S. or international agency defines “reef safe,” “reef friendly” or “reef conscious.”
• Sunscreen companies can't back up “reef safe.” Advertising law requires proof for an environmental claim, and no test can prove a sunscreen does zero harm to coral. Some products probably are harmless to reefs. Nobody can prove it.
• Companies have paid for these labels. Supergoop paid $350,000 over “reef friendly” and “reef safe,” and Sun Bum paid $300,000 over “reef friendly,” both on chemical-filter sunscreens.
• That's why we say “reef friendly,” and spell out what's behind it: non-nano zinc oxide as the only active, and none of the chemical filters those cases were about.

I’m sure you’ve heard one of these terms: “Reef safe,” “reef friendly,” “reef conscious.”

If you’re like me, before I got into making sunscreen, you probably assumed that they were regulated and certifiable terms. A level of standard with a certification behind each one.

Nope. There isn't. No seal, no organization checking to verify. Nobody defines any of them, except the sunscreen companies who make the products.

I’m not against self-claiming. If you know what’s in your product and you know what it does, I feel you should be able to make those statements without paying a third-party verification source to confirm what you already know.

But in a world where marketing rules, it’s easy for companies to overstate. And they do.

So when it comes to sunscreen, “reef safe” is one of those marketing terms that has had a lot of scrutiny. The truth is, no one can really back it up, and that’s why regulators don’t like it.

We choose to use “reef friendly,” and I’ll explain all the reasoning behind that and more here.

What do “reef safe,” “reef friendly” and “reef conscious” mean?

None of them has a legal meaning. The FDA regulates sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug, so it reviews SPF, broad-spectrum testing and which active ingredients are allowed. What happens to the ocean afterward isn't part of that. The FTC's Green Guides, the federal rules for environmental marketing, were last updated in 2012 and don't mention reefs.¹ NOAA and the EPA don't define the terms either, but this is generally how it works. Regulation is almost always behind.

So each brand gets to decide on its own. Most of this labeling traces back to July 2018, when Hawaii passed the first law banning the sale of sunscreen made with oxybenzone or octinoxate, starting in 2021.² Manufacturers reformulated, and the coral and reef logos showed up soon after. For a lot of products, “reef safe,” “reef friendly” and “reef conscious” all mean the same thing: no oxybenzone, no octinoxate. That just means the product is legal to sell in Hawaii. Hawaii's law bans two ingredients. It doesn't test anything, certify anything, or say what is safe for coral.

Many of those formulas kept other chemical filters, like avobenzone, octocrylene and homosalate, that all have open questions of their own. When dermatologists looked at 97 popular sunscreens on Amazon, about half carried a “reef safe” claim, and nearly half of those didn't meet NOAA's broader list of ingredients of concern.³

The differences between the three are tone, not substance. “Reef safe” promises no harm. “Reef friendly” and “reef conscious” are softer claims. We use “reef friendly” because our sunscreen has no chemical UV filters, and further down I’ll show you exactly what’s in it.

Why can't sunscreen companies say “reef safe”?

Because none of us can prove it.

Under the FTC's Green Guides and state laws like California's false-advertising statute, a company making an environmental claim has to have competent and reliable scientific evidence behind it. The Green Guides go further and warn against broad, unqualified environmental claims, because they're nearly impossible to back up.¹ “Safe” is about as broad as a claim gets.

To prove a sunscreen is safe for reefs, you'd have to show it does no harm to any coral, in any amount, in any water conditions. No such test exists. There's no standardized method for testing sunscreen on coral at all, a gap a 2021 review pointed out when it found none of the coral studies it examined reliable enough to base regulation on.⁴

That doesn't mean every product labeled “reef safe” hurts coral. Plenty probably don't. It means nobody can prove they don't, so nobody can safely say it.

What do I think of this type of standard? I’m not fully sure. It’s really about semantics. Safe vs. friendly. But the same logic runs in reverse for a lot of chemicals. In 2019 the FDA proposed that only two sunscreen filters, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, had enough evidence to be called safe and effective. Twelve others, including oxybenzone and avobenzone, went into a category the agency calls “insufficient data.” They're still on shelves.¹⁹ So a sunscreen can't say “reef safe” without proof, but it can stay on sale without proof that its filters are safe for you.

What I am down with is when companies who clearly have nasty chemicals in their products that could harm reefs are held up to this standard.

Which sunscreen companies got in trouble over reef claims?

In May 2025, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's office in California won what it called the first judgment of its kind against a major sunscreen maker. Sun Bum had shipped “reef friendly” display cards to stores for its chemical sunscreens from 2018 to 2021. It paid $300,000 in penalties plus $25,000 to a reef restoration project, and it can no longer call those products “reef friendly” or “reef compliant” or show a coral reef in the ads.⁵

A month later the same office settled with Supergoop for $350,000. Supergoop had called its chemical sunscreens “reef friendly” and “reef safe,” and the court ordered it to stop using both phrases on those products.⁶ The office is also suing Edgewell, the maker of Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic, over similar “reef friendly” claims; that case was filed in March 2025.⁵

Shoppers have sued too. A 2021 class action against Target claims its Up & Up sunscreens were wrongly labeled “reef-conscious” because they contain avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate and octocrylene.⁷ A 2024 class action makes the same argument against Big Lots and its Sound Body sunscreen.⁸ Neither had been decided when this article was published.

Every one of these cases has the same pattern: a reef label on a sunscreen made with chemical filters. The softer phrases didn't protect anyone. “Reef friendly” and “reef conscious” got enforced the same as “reef safe” when the formula didn't support them.

What does the research say sunscreen does to coral?

The study that set off the bans came out in 2016. Craig Downs and his team exposed coral larvae and coral cells to oxybenzone in the lab and found bleaching, DNA damage and deformed larvae, with the damage much worse in light than in the dark.⁹ Critics point out that most reef monitoring finds oxybenzone in parts per trillion, often a hundred to a thousand times lower than the doses that harmed coral in the lab. The National Academies of Sciences reviewed the research in 2022 and found there “is not widespread agreement” on whether it shows harm.¹⁰

Then in 2022 a Stanford team found something stranger. Corals and sea anemones attach a sugar molecule to oxybenzone as they process it, and the new compound does the opposite of what a sunscreen filter does. Instead of absorbing UV and letting it go as heat, it absorbs UV and generates molecules that damage tissue. The algae inside healthy coral soak up that compound and protect their host. Bleached coral, which has already lost its algae to heat, has no such buffer.¹¹

Oxybenzone isn't the only filter with questions. Avobenzone, a common replacement, is close to it in structure, and octocrylene builds up in coral tissue.¹² That's why the U.S. Virgin Islands banned octocrylene along with the other two, and why Palau's 2020 law goes furthest, banning ten chemicals: four UV filters (oxybenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene and 4-methylbenzylidene camphor) plus triclosan, four parabens and phenoxyethanol.²⁰

Is mineral sunscreen automatically reef friendly?

Not automatically. In a 2018 lab study, uncoated zinc oxide nanoparticles caused severe bleaching in branching coral within 48 hours.¹³ Nanoparticles dissolve faster, release more zinc ions, and react more with sunlight than larger particles do. Non-nano zinc oxide, the kind we use, is made of larger particles that sit on the surface of your skin, but it has barely been tested on coral at all.

A 2025 study from the Maldives gets cited a lot here. Researchers put corals in tanks with three sunscreens labeled “reef safe” or “coral friendly.” The zinc one caused 96% tissue loss in two species; the two chemical-filter sunscreens did little or no damage.¹⁴ They used a quarter gram of sunscreen per liter of water, far more than any reef sees, and they tested whole products, so the study can't say whether the zinc or something else in that formula did the damage. Zinc also occurs naturally in seawater in trace amounts, and coral needs it. The dose is the question, and that study didn't test what you’d see in nature in a real world example.

Does this study mean zinc is the problem? No, I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. We can die from too much water. So too much sunscreen in a laboratory tank isn’t a great representation of what is happening in our oceans.

Does sunscreen matter compared with everything else hitting reefs?

Much less than the labels suggest. When the Great Barrier Reef bleached in 2016, the damage followed the water temperature. Remote reefs that never see a swimmer bleached as badly as the ones near tourist beaches.¹⁵ The bleaching event that began in 2023 is the largest on record, reaching about 84% of the world's reef area by 2025.¹⁶ Sunscreen is a local problem at crowded swim spots.

None of that is a reason to skip sunscreen. At least one in five Americans will get skin cancer by age 70,¹⁷ and in the long-running Nambour trial in Australia, people who used sunscreen every day had about half the melanomas of people who used it when they felt like it.¹⁸

Why do we say “reef friendly” instead of “reef safe”?

Because “reef safe” is a claim we can't prove, and neither can anyone else.

“Reef friendly” is the claim we can back up, as long as we tell you exactly what's behind it. The only active ingredient is non-nano zinc oxide. There's no oxybenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, avobenzone, homosalate or octisalate, which covers every filter named in the cases above and the filters banned in Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Palau.

There's no water in the formula either, so there's no preservative system washing off with it. It's all on the back of the package.

It doesn't necessarily mean “harmless to coral.” Nobody can scientifically promise that.

What should you look for on a sunscreen label?

Ignore the front. The coral and ocean logos and whichever reef phrase sits next to it are marketing. Turn it over and read the Drug Facts box, where the active ingredients have to be listed. Zinc oxide or titanium dioxide alone is the shortest list of open questions you'll find, and they're the only two filters the FDA proposed as generally recognized as safe and effective in 2019.¹⁹ Look for “non-nano” on the bottle, box or website as well.

Then the real hack: put less sunscreen in the water to begin with. A UPF swim shirt covers your back and shoulders without anything washing off, and shade at midday cuts how much you need at all. Use your sunscreen on what's left exposed to the sun.

What the reef labels mean, in the end

“Reef safe,” “reef friendly” and “reef conscious” mean whatever the brand printing them decides, and often that's just “we took out the two chemicals Hawaii banned.” “Reef safe” can't be proven by anyone. The softer phrases hold up only when the ingredient list does.

So that’s the extent of it. Just like with anything you’re buying, you have to be your own informed advocate. You can’t trust the marketing, but you can be educated enough to see through it.

If you have a little more time, here are some more resources to make you your own sunscreen expert: If you want a full daily routine, it's in The Sun Lover's Guide to Daily Sun Protection. The mineral-versus-chemical details are in The Real Difference Between Mineral and Chemical Sunscreen, the zinc story is in Is Non-Nano Zinc Oxide Safe?, and why the ocean is part of how we started this brand is in our piece on Paul Watson and ocean conservation. And if you want a sunscreen that tells you exactly what's in it, that's our reef friendly mineral sunscreen.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between “reef safe,” “reef friendly” and “reef conscious”?

Legally, none. No U.S. or international regulator defines any of the three, so each brand decides what it means. Most use them to mean the product has no oxybenzone or octinoxate, the two filters Hawaii banned. “Reef safe” implies no harm at all, which no sunscreen can prove; “reef friendly” and “reef conscious” are softer, but companies have still been sued and fined over them.

Why can't sunscreen companies say “reef safe”?

Advertising law requires companies to back up environmental claims with competent and reliable scientific evidence, and the FTC's Green Guides warn against broad, unqualified environmental claims. No test can prove a sunscreen does zero harm to coral, so “reef safe” can't be substantiated. Some products may well be harmless to reefs; nobody can prove it.

Which sunscreen companies were fined over reef claims?

In 2025 the Santa Clara County District Attorney in California secured a $300,000 judgment against Sun Bum over “reef friendly” claims and a $350,000 settlement with Supergoop over “reef friendly” and “reef safe” claims, both on chemical-filter sunscreens. A case against Edgewell, the maker of Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic, is pending, and class actions have been filed against Target and Big Lots over “reef conscious” labels.

Is zinc oxide safe for coral reefs?

It isn't proven safe. Uncoated zinc oxide nanoparticles caused fast bleaching in lab studies. Non-nano zinc oxide uses larger particles and has barely been tested on coral. A 2025 tank study found a zinc sunscreen damaged coral, but at a dose far above real reef levels and without isolating the zinc from the rest of the formula.

Which sunscreen ingredients are banned in Hawaii?

Hawaii bans the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone or octinoxate without a prescription, effective January 1, 2021. Maui County and Hawaii County allow only mineral sunscreens. The U.S. Virgin Islands also bans octocrylene, and Palau bans ten named chemicals.

What does salt+blue mean by “reef friendly”?

Non-nano zinc oxide as the only active ingredient, and none of the chemical filters named in the reef-claim cases or banned in Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands or Palau. It does not mean harmless to coral, which no sunscreen can claim.

About the author

Kevin Gianni is the co-founder of salt+blue and Annmarie Skin Care and the author of Kale and Coffee. He's spent more than twenty years researching natural health and personal-care ingredients — reading studies, interviewing experts, and questioning dubious marketing.

Part of the Sun Lover's Guide to daily sun protection.

References

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