Our Story
"We called it sunsense because apparently somebody had to."
— The founding of sunsense
A quiet national health crisis.
Last summer, more than half of the Dutch population came home with sunburn. Fifty-six percent. That is not a warm-weather anomaly, it is what happens in a country where sun protection is treated as an occasional luxury instead of daily care.
Every year, 81,000 people in the Netherlands are diagnosed with skin cancer. Roughly a thousand of them will die from it. It is now the most common cancer in the country, and the fastest growing.
The strange part is that most people know the risk. Fifty-one percent of Dutch adults understand that unprotected sun exposure is dangerous. And yet 37% rarely or never apply SPF 30 or higher, and 35% report feeling vulnerable but unprotected.
The gap between what we know and what we do is not a matter of will. It is a matter of what the system makes possible.
How much do you actually need?
Dermatologists agree: proper sun protection requires 30ml, roughly seven teaspoons, for a full-body application. Reapplied every two hours, that means three applications per sun day. And in the Netherlands, we get about 35 real sun days per summer.
Do the math and it lands on a number nobody wants to hear:
Take that to a family of four, parents and two kids, and you are at 12 litres a year. Sixty-four bottles. Nobody buys sixty-four bottles of sunscreen. Nobody has ever bought sixty-four bottles of sunscreen.
Which means almost nobody is using enough. The Netherlands should be buying 276 million bottles per year for proper protection. Last year it bought about nine million.
"We are using about 3% of the sunscreen we actually need. This is not a preference. This is what the price forces."
Why nobody uses enough.
Walk into any Dutch drugstore. A 200ml SPF 50+ from the Albert Heijn own-brand shelf costs 7.99 euro. The Nivea equivalent is 25.99 euro.
Now apply the math from Chapter 02. If you actually use what your skin needs, protecting one person for one Dutch summer costs:
This is not a cost of living someone put in a budget. This is the cost of protecting your skin at the level a dermatologist would recommend, at the prices we actually pay. It is unaffordable, and everyone knows it.
A 2025 survey of 1,585 Dutch consumers found that 1 in 3 people aged 18-35 use less sunscreen than they know they should because of the price. Thirty-four percent spend between five and ten euros per bottle, a fraction of what proper protection would cost.
"The sun care industry sells you a small bottle and expects you to buy sixteen. Then it is surprised when nobody does."
Sixteen bottles per person. Multiply.
If the Netherlands used the sunscreen it should, 276 million bottles a year, those bottles would end up somewhere. Most of them in landfills. Cosmetic packaging is 62% unrecyclable, and globally only 9% of all plastic is recycled. The rest is either burned, buried, or lost to the ocean.
Which is why we already have a problem in the current, undersupplied system. Of the nine million sunscreen bottles the Netherlands buys each year, an estimated 8.2 million end up in the bin.
A system that requires people to buy sixteen small plastic bottles per person per year to stay safe is not a health system. It is not an environmental system. It is a business model that was never designed to be used properly.
And the tragedy is that the two problems, too little sun protection and too much plastic waste, are not separate. They are the same problem, from two directions.
The obvious answer somebody had to make.
If people need more sunscreen than any small bottle can hold, sell them a big bottle. If plastic is the problem, make it refillable. If the price per millilitre is the barrier, price it fairly. If the small refill tubes are what people actually carry, keep them, but make them work with the big bottle.
It is embarrassing how simple this is. And it is more embarrassing that nobody had done it.
"We called it sunsense because apparently somebody had to. The sun care industry has been selling you small, expensive, single-use plastic bottles for decades. We thought it was time someone brought a little sense to sun protection."
sunsense started with a single, unsexy idea: that the entire architecture of sun protection, from packaging to pricing to refill logistics, should be redesigned around the volume people actually need. Not the volume a marketing team decided was psychologically palatable at 7.99 euro.
Everything else, the formula, the design, the return system, the price, followed from that one decision.
One mother pack. Two refill tubes.
A one-litre refill bottle lives on your bathroom shelf. It stays there for the season. It is the mother pack, the source. From it, in under sixty seconds, you top up the two refill tubes that travel with you: a 200ml daily tube for your bag, and a 100ml travel tube that is airline-compliant.
The pump nozzle on the 1L is designed to fit the openings of the smaller refill tubes directly. No funnels. No spills. Twenty pumps for 100ml, forty pumps for 200ml. It takes less time than finding your keys.
The formula is SPF 50+ with high UVA protection, built on new-generation organic filters — no white cast on any skin tone — reef-safe, fragrance-free, and dermatologically tested. Applied 105 times a season, it needed to be all of those things. There is no compromise on volume-quality here, it is a daily-use skincare product that happens to also be sun protection.
The whole system was built for the way you actually live. Not for how a marketing team wishes you would.
The only bottle that should end up in the bin.
The refill loop is deliberately boring: the 1000ml bottle lives on your shelf, the small tubes travel with you, and when they run dry you top them up in seconds. When the big bottle is finally empty, you order a refill — not new packaging, not a new system, not another shelf of single-use plastic.
Keep the bottles. Refill them for as long as they last. That is the entire idea.
"Because the only bottle that should end up in the bin is the one that never existed."
The maths of this system are stark: one 1L bottle, cycled through fifty refills, replaces roughly 400 small tubes. That is one bottle of plastic, produced once, doing the work of four hundred. Multiplied across a country, it is the difference between a landfill and a stockroom.
It is not perfect. Nothing is. But it is the difference we can measure, right now, with the tools that exist. And it is the difference we chose to build.
Sources
- Nationaal Huidfonds and Maastricht University, national survey on sun exposure and skin cancer in the Netherlands, May 2026. Reported incidence: 81,000 diagnoses annually. Sunburn prevalence 56% in 2025 summer season.
- NL cosmetics market estimate, approximately 90M euro annual sunscreen segment (2021 baseline). Volume estimation: 9M standard 200ml bottles per year sold. Required-volume calculation: 3.15L per person times 17.5M population.
- Retail pricing survey, Dutch drugstore prices for 200ml SPF 50+ formulations, Q2 2026. Albert Heijn own-brand: 7.99 euro. Nivea Sun Protect and Moisture 200ml: 25.99 euro.
- MSI-ACI Netherlands consumer study, sample n=1,585, sunscreen affordability and behaviour, 2025.
- Cosmetic packaging waste analysis, based on 9% global recycling rate (OECD, 2022), applied to Dutch cosmetic market. 62% of cosmetic packaging estimated as functionally unrecyclable due to mixed materials.
The spirit of sunsense
Use more.
Waste less.
Never compromise.
A refillable system built for the volume of protection your skin actually needs, at a price that lets you use it, without the plastic that comes with everything else.