When and by whom was sunscreen invented?
When legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel tanned during a Mediterranean cruise in the 1920s, tanned skin became synonymous with beauty, fashion and a healthy lifestyle.
When the Popular Front won the 1936 French general election and passed legislation allowing workers to be entitled to paid vacations each year, the French began to spend more time in the sun, paving the way for the first sunscreen invention in 1936.
The History of Sunscreen:
The history of sunscreen can be traced all the way back to the 1930s when Swiss student Franz Greiter made it his mission to invent sun protection after being sunburnt on his ascent up Mount Piz Buin.
Eugene Schueller (1881-1957), French chemist and founder of L'Oreal, created the world's first sunscreen "Bellis". The effectiveness of this product in preventing skin cancers was poor compared to modern formulations, and many tanning lotion attempts were essentially nothing more than crude oil-based pastes. Twenty-six years later, chemist Franz Greiter developed the Sun Protection Factor (SPF) in 1962. This made history as the first real attempt to classify how effective sunscreens are at blocking the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
1936 — L'Oreal founder Eugene Schuller develops his own version. Is sometimes credited as the man who invented sunscreen. 1938 — Franz Greiter, a Swiss chemistry student, gets sunburnt while climbing a mountain in Austria, of all places. He decides to create a sunscreen.
Schueller began experimenting with chemicals responsible for color pigmentation at home in 1903. He found that the chemicals were permanently absorbed by human hair when mixed with ammonia and peroxide. In 1907, he began successfully marketing his new synthetic hair coloring formula under the name Aureole to hairdressers in Paris. The first mass-produced sunscreen was a combination of jasmine and cocoa butter mixed in an old granite coffee pot by Florida-based pharmacist Benjamin Green, who did research with the Coppertone Company in 1944.