We all remember the advice drilled into us as kids as soon as summer rolled around: Slip, Slop, Slap! Yep, slip on a T-shirt, slop on some sunscreen and slap on a (logo branded) hat. We can help you out with branded tees, hats and sunscreen to get your summer promotional campaigns sizzling, but who invented the magical stuff that keeps us safe from the sun?

Promotional Suncreen

It’s Older Than You Might Think

There’s evidence to show that humans have been using various plants as primitive sunscreen for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks, for example, are known to have used olive oil as sunblock, and the ancient Egyptians harnessed rice, jasmine and flower extracts, many of which are still used in skincare products today.

What About The Modern Promotional Sunscreen?

According to Wikipedia, the first synthetic sunscreens were developed in the late 1920s. French chemist Eugène Schueller – founder of L'Oréal – is credited with bringing one of the first modern sunscreens to market in 1936. But Australian chemist Milton Blake also has a claim as the inventor after he developed an early version of sunscreen in his kitchen in the 1930s.

An Austrian scientist by the name of Franz Greiter developed some of the first truly effective and commercially successful sunscreens in the 1930s and 1940s after getting sunburnt while climbing Mount Piz Buin on the Swiss-Austrian border. And we can’t forget Benjamin Green, an American airman and physician who developed a sunscreen known as ‘Red Vet Pet’ due to its red colour for US troops during World War Two.

So Nobody Really Knows?

Well, no. Schueller, Blake, Greiter and Green are all often credited as being the inventor of sunscreen. All we know is it’s essential stuff if you’re going to Slip, Slop, Slap! Grab some promotional sunscreen for your next campaign today.