Most notably, a European Food Safety Authority safety assessment published in May 2021 pointed to genotoxicity concerns, as suggested by previous research. Genotoxicity is the ability of chemicals to damage genetic information such as DNA, which may lead to cancer.
It’s true that titanium dioxide does not rank as high for UVA protection as zinc oxide, it ends up being a small difference (think about it like being 10 years old versus 10 years and 3 months old). This is not easily understood in terms of other factors affecting how sunscreen actives perform (such as the base formula), so many, including some dermatologists, assume that zinc oxide is superior to titanium dioxide for UVA protection. When carefully formulated, titanium dioxide provides excellent UVA protection. Its UVA protection peak is lower than that of zinc oxide, but both continue to provide protection throughout the UVA range for the same amount of time.
≥105
A 2012 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology noted that children are especially exposed to titanium dioxide because of the food that contains the food additive and is particularly marketed to children, including candy and cakes.
CSPI’s Chemical Cuisine is the web’s definitive rating of the chemicals used to preserve foods and affect their taste, texture, or appearance. Besides titanium dioxide, the group recommends avoiding artificial sweeteners like aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose, as well as synthetic food dyes like Yellow 5 and Red 3. CSPI and others have recently asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban the latter dye in foods and ingested drugs because the FDA has already determined that it is a carcinogen unsafe for use in cosmetics.

Over the last several years, nanoparticles have come under scrutiny for adverse health effects. Nanoparticles are ultrafine particles between 1 to 100 nanometers in diameter. (To put this in perspective, the average human hair is around 80,000 nanometers thick.) Because of their size, which can be engineered and manipulated at the atomic or molecular level, nanoparticles exhibit unique physical, chemical, and biological properties. Titanium dioxide is one of the most commonly produced nanoparticles in the world.

The lack of clear regulations and controls explains that P25TiO2NPs are still found in many of the commercialized sunscreens in the market. Some of them are coated to reduce the photoactivity of the anatase form, which is known to be responsible for tissue damage, but not enough studies were made on these coated forms. The anatase photoactivity could trigger the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, as it was stated before. The ROS are chemically reactive species containing oxygen, such as peroxides, superoxide, hydroxyl radical, and singlet oxygen. They are regularly produced in the biological milieu and counterbalanced by physiological antioxidant defense mechanisms. However, an abrupt increase of ROS may result in non-reversible damage to the skin cells. The effects of coated and uncoated P25TiO2NPs need therefore to be studied, and articles on this topic present different conclusions. [11], [12], [13] Recent literature on this topic found that TiO2NPs inhalation provokes serious genotoxicity and DNA damage [14], [15], [16], [17]. On the other hand, some studies in rats have reported no significant harm to genetic material [18], [19], [20], [21], [22].
Genotoxicity Assessment
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