ELLE Exclusive: Labelled 50+. Tested At 92.7. This Founder Shows Her Receipts

Indian sunscreen just survived the worst year of its life. A viral round of independent lab testing claimed six of ten best-selling SPFs delivered less than half the protection on their labels. Brands and dermatologists contested the methodology. The Bureau of Indian Standards didn’t wait for the argument to settle. The Bureau of Indian Standards followed with IS 17494:2025, aligning the country with ISO 24444 and making in-vivo human testing mandatory from January 10, 2026. Translation: an Indian SPF number now has to survive a room of volunteers and a UV lamp.

Into that year walks a ₹2,290 solid stick whose press release spends most of its word count on how nice it feels. Cooling cues. Velvety glide. Touchless finish. The vocabulary of pleasure, arriving in the exact season the category got dragged into arithmetic.

So we sent Justhuman founder Roshini Sanah Jaiswal ten questions about that timing. She answered by taking claims off the table.

First, the Numbers

The note names the filter system without attaching a single figure to it. Asked why, Jaiswal produced all of them without blinking.

“SPF 50+, PA++++ on the label and in third-party in-vivo testing under ISO 24444 and ISO 24442, IRB-approved and conducted at the Korea Institute of Dermatological Sciences in Seoul, the measured SPF was 92.7 and the UVA protection factor was 18, against a PA++++ threshold of 16. We test well beyond what we print.”

The filters she named gladly: Uvinul A Plus, Ethylhexyl Triazone, Tinosorb S, Polysilicone-15. No minerals, which is how the stick stays transparent on Indian skin instead of chalking it.

Her reason for burying the number is the most interesting thing about her marketing. “SPF is the entry ticket, not the story. Every serious sunscreen has to clear that bar. What we wanted to build was the reason you’ll still be wearing it at 4 pm.”

The Claim She Just Took Back

Her own press release calls the stick “sweat- and water-resistant.” Asked for the data behind it, she declined to defend her own copy.

“We have engineered the film for wear in heat and humidity, but I won’t turn formulation technology into a clinical claim. We haven’t completed a finished-product water-resistance test, so I’m not going to call it water-resistant until we have that data.”

A founder retracting a label claim mid-interview is not something that happens often in Indian beauty. File it under receipts.

What the PDRN is actually doing (less than you think)

PDRN — polydeoxyribonucleotide, salmon DNA fragments — carries its heavyweight evidence as an injectable in wound care and regenerative medicine, delivered well past the skin barrier. So what is it doing in a product designed to sit on the surface and come off?

Jaiswal answered with a figure almost nobody in this category will disclose.

“Ours runs from 48 to 325 kilodaltons, approximately 75 to 500 base pairs, at over 99.9 per cent purity, verified by gel electrophoresis at the ingredient house. That’s native salmon PDRN, not hydrolysed fragments dressed up in the name. And here’s the honest consequence of that number: at that molecular size, we would not claim meaningful passive penetration through intact stratum corneum.”

Which quietly demotes the ingredient the product is named after. “In this leave-on formulation, PDRN is a supporting skin-conditioning ingredient. We are not claiming injectable-style regeneration from it. The heroes of this stick are the UV filter system and the sensory engineering.”

Then the line that belongs above every desk in Indian beauty PR: “We’d rather claim the surface truthfully than the dermis fictionally.”

The Stick Problem: Four to Five Passes

Dermatologists have one standing objection to this format, and it is dose. SPF is tested at 2 mg/cm². Sticks go on clear, which kills the visual cue telling you to stop, and glide kills the friction that deposits product. Justhuman has engineered for glide.

Rather than argue, Jaiswal had it measured. “Under normal application pressure, our stick deposits approximately 0.44 mg/cm² per pass. Since SPF is tested at 2 mg/cm², that translates to roughly four to five passes over the same area.”

Write that down, because it is the most useful instruction manual for any sun stick you own.

Her defence of the format is about the hour nobody talks about. “Real-world protection doesn’t fail only at 8 am; it also fails at 12 pm, when people don’t reapply. Reapplying a cream over makeup, at a desk or in a car is simply inconvenient.”

And then, the thesis: “If pleasure gets someone to their third application of the day, pleasure is doing protection’s job.”

₹2,290, and Who She Priced it For

Three to four times the everyday Indian sun stick, which cuts against a product whose entire logic is applying generously and often. She offered no apology. “A ₹600 sunstick sitting in a drawer isn’t delivering better value simply because it was cheaper.”

Underneath the price is a sharper argument about where Indian brands are permitted to stand. “We readily accept premium pricing from international prestige brands, but an Indian brand at the same table is often expected to explain why it deserves to be there. I think that needs to change. If the formulation, science, manufacturing and experience justify the price, the passport of the brand shouldn’t determine what it is allowed to charge.”

On the Korean formulation, she rejected the idea that it was built for someone else’s weather. “Asian suncare has long been deeply concerned with UVA, tanning and pigmentation — which is precisely the conversation we’re having in India.” More than 22 per cent of the stick is water, unusual for the format, which is where the cold hit on contact comes from. Powders, film-formers and silicones handle the humidity and the shine after.

The Wound Underneath

Justhuman began in three years of lichen planopilaris, an autoimmune condition that took, by Jaiswal’s account, 70 per cent of her hair. She draws a hard line between what that taught her and what sensory design means to a brand that found it through a mood board.

“Relief and pleasure aren’t opposites; relief taught me what pleasure is for. When your skin has been a source of distress, the moment a product feels kind on your skin instead of clinical, that isn’t indulgence.”

The commercial version is less tender and considerably more precise. “I was a woman in my late forties, going through menopause, losing collagen and estrogen, with real disposable income — and nobody in beauty was talking to me. I felt invisible to the industry.”

So Who Audits Feel?

Numbers are regulated in India now. Feel is not, and Jaiswal argues it doesn’t need to be, because it’s the one claim in beauty the customer can test on herself.

“Feel is the one claim in beauty the customer audits herself, in ten seconds, with her own skin — no lab required. If a product claims to feel weightless and it doesn’t, she knows immediately. And she doesn’t come back.”

Her list of what gets audited next reads like a map of the category’s remaining soft spots. “Ingredient claims. Efficacy claims. ‘Clinically proven’ without telling you what was tested or how.” The enforcers, she expects, will be journalists, scientists, and “a consumer who has learned to ask: says who?”

What she wants is stranger and harder than another standard. “I don’t think India simply needs more standards and more language on bottles. I think it needs more brands willing to under-claim and over-test.”

Her press release is still carrying a water-resistance claim she has now withdrawn. She has set a bar her own marketing hasn’t cleared yet — which is more or less the state of Indian beauty in 2026, caught between what it has finally learned to measure and what it is still in the habit of saying.

The Justhuman PDRN Shield Sun Stick SPF 50+ PA++++ is ₹2,290, available on the brand’s website.