Edible sunscreen capsules popular among Chinese consumers were recently declared "functionless" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Shanghai Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The capsules claimed that they could protect against sunburns. The price of imported capsules from Japan, Singapore, Spain and the U.S. were sold for hundreds of yuan on Chinese e-commerce sites.
However, after news went viral that a teenage girl was sunburned despite eating the capsules, their effectiveness was questioned. The American FDA warned that pills or capsules cannot replace lotion-style sunscreen.
In the first six months of this year, Shanghai's municipal food and drug supervision department received 22 complaints concerning sunscreen products. Most complained about the lack of Chinese-language instructions on the packaging of imported products.
