The Dive Locker, episode 14. In this episode we hear from Autumn Blum, Founder and CEO of Stream2Sea about the importance of reef safe sunscreens and products.
Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.
I’m your host Tec Clark and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving for those here in the United States. I did. It was fantastic, but I don’t know if I can fit in my wet suit anymore. That remains to be seen. I ate a lot, but you know, it’s this time a year that we have Thanksgiving here in the US we have black Friday, we have local business Saturday, we have cyber Monday, giving Tuesday, you know, all these things that’s based on the holiday gift giving time. So holiday gifts are on our minds. Well, there’s a gift, a product that I use and I strongly believe in it and I give it to divers. And whether it’s students, whether it’s customers or whether it’s people that I know and love, it’s the Stream2Sea line of coral safe products.
Now I don’t promote or sponsor things on this show unless I truly, truly believe in them. I believe in the Stream2Sea product line because it helps two things that are vitally important to me. Number one is my health and number two is our environment’s health. So today you are going to hear from Autumn Blum, Founder and CEO of Stream2Sea. Now she was a cosmetic chemist, is a cosmetic chemist and also a passionate diver. And so she tied those two worlds together, did studies on what sunscreens could potentially do to our aquatic environments and what she found was riveting.
She found that the ingredients in sunscreens were not only potentially harmful to humans, but toxic to corals. So please, if you value our reefs as dive professionals, you need to be able to articulate the things that Autumn is talking about in this episode. You need to be able to tell your students and your customers about why coral safe sunscreens and coral safe products are vitally important to them and the environment.
Before we get to this interview, this is sponsored by the Scuba Exam App. I’ve partnered with the award winning Swedish app development team, Boboshi for this enhanced diving knowledge tool that helps students pass their scuba exams. Since 2010 the Scuba Exam App has helped thousands of people on their way to getting their dive certifications. The Scuba Exam App is loaded with features. You can customize your quizzes by selecting whether you want it timed or not timed; unanswered questions only or you can repeat questions.
You can have questions flagged to follow up and answer them again. And, you can have incorrectly answered questions come again and how many questions you would like to be quizzed on are all part of the settings that you can set up. You can also select to be quizzed on general questions or dive tables or both together and you can choose which agency’s dive tables you want to be tested on PADI, NAUI or SSI. You can also select whether you would like your dive table questions to be in meters or feet.
And every question comes with an explanation detailing the reason for the correct answer. The Scuba Exam App contains over 200 scuba theory questions and 50 dive table questions and you will find that these questions can help any level of diver. Scuba Exam App is only $4.99 . It’s available for iOS and Android and there’s even a Scuba Exam Lite that’s a free version, less content, less features, but it’s free. Use it, turn on your students to it and you’ll find that it’s available at the Apple App Store or Google Play Apps. All right pros, let’s dive into my interview with Autumn Blum of Stream2Sea.
TEC CLARK: All right, Autumn. We are here at the DEMA Show 2019 in Orlando, Florida. It’s great to see you again. How you doing?
AUTUMN BLUM: It’s fantastic to see you to Tec. It’s a great show so far.
TEC CLARK: Good, good, good. Well, yeah, this is day one and you’re already having incredible success at your booth. I went by to get you for this recording and your booth was packed and everybody was talking to somebody and everything. You got all these products out and all Stream2Sea has been really, really a very popular product. And I’m not going to say just product or products, it’s almost a movement. Will you explain to dive professionals what your brand is about and why it came to be?
AUTUMN BLUM: Absolutely. So I’m a diver as well Tec, right? So I had a skincare company, um, that I started right out of college. I grew it. I’m a cosmetic chemist. That’s my background, and I sold it in 2009. I was a junior diver and for the first time in my adult life I had disposable income and disposable time. Those never seem to go together well. And I started diving again, right?
So I’m out there in the ocean, I’m in Palau, and it was the most spectacular, beautiful reef that I’d ever seen. And I’m coming up to my safety stop and I saw what appeared to be like a rainbow on the surface, and as I got closer I realized that it wasn’t a rainbow, but it was an oil slick and it was coming off a group of snorkelers. And that was the first time in my career, now, I had been making products for the health food industry for 15 years at that point. It was the first time that I thought about how these products that affect our bodies might be affecting our planet, our oceans, our reefs.
I get back on the boat and I look overboard and I mean it’s like I could see, I could see the reef underneath and people are showering on the back of the boat and the suds are running overboard. And I’m seeing Nemo like gasping, right? I mean I just, I felt it and I came home and I knew that I had to start Stream2Sea. So, so Stream2Sea is about creating products that are safe for you, safe for our families, and safe our planet.
TEC CLARK: Got it. Excellent. Tell us about that. So, um, what is it about sunscreen in particular? Cause this kind of was the launching point, on the sunscreen side of it. What is it about common sunscreens that is problematic to our oceans and our reefs?
AUTUMN BLUM: So sunscreens are regulated as drugs right. They’re known to work inside of our body. That’s why you have to put it on 15 minutes prior to exposure. So those chemical ingredients have time to soak into the fatty layers, your body where they absorb the radiation, and then your body has to filter it out, right? So these ingredients are, the FDA is starting to call them into question. A lot of them are known to be endocrine disrupting chemicals.
TEC CLARK: What does that mean?
AUTUMN BLUM: That is, it messes with your hormones. And there’s a, there’s a popular… It doesn’t sound good. A lot of them are estrogenic, you know, so when I’m giving dive briefings or I’m teaching, I’m teaching dive guides and we start talking about the science. We really get into it. I talk about the estrogen mimics, right? I mean these things stimulate estrogen in our bodies. They stimulate estrogen in the fish. They’ve shown you put sunscreen in a tank with fish and male fish will convert to female when they’re not supposed to. I mean, it’s serious stuff.
And there is endocrinologists, people that study hormones, that say that the endocrine disruptors work the same way in a fish, in a rabbit and in the human. And we’re fighting, it’s the same thing with coral, right? Our reefs are alive and we’re messing with their hormones. It’s the development cycle of our reefs that are being affected by these sunscreen ingredients. It’s pretty freaky.
TEC CLARK: My goodness. So what is it about your products then, the changes that’s not part of that.
AUTUMN BLUM: Yeah. So first we don’t have any endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in our sunscreens, right? I mean, we can start talking about hormones. Good. So we can start talking about, uh, you know, the chemicals to avoid the oxybenzone, the avobenzone, the octocrylene, the octinoxate, um, the Hawaii bans, for example, Hawaii has looked at the studies and they’ve learned that oxybenzone and octinoxate are two ingredients that have been found to disrupt coral larva development and they decided to ban those two ingredients.
The challenge for the dive industry and for the conscious consumer is that savvy marketing companies have come along and said, “okay, we can’t use oxybenzone and octocrylene or octinoxate anymore. Let’s replace it with avobenzone and octocrylene.” Two very similar chemicals, also endocrine disruptors, but not yet banned. And that’s what’s going on for the consumers. And that’s why it’s really so important for the dive instructors, for the dive professionals to really understand how to read the back of the label. You cannot trust what’s on the front of the label anymore. You have to flip it over and look at what those ingredients are and kind of know what you’re looking at. And it’s pretty simple. It doesn’t need to be as complicated as what I’m saying here.
TEC CLARK: Do you think others are going to then brand and say this is coral safe sunscreen and that’s what they’re doing.
AUTUMN BLUM: Yeah. So they’re taking oxybenzone and octinoxate out. They’re replacing it with other chemicals and they’re slapping a reef safe label on the front of it. There’s no standard yet on what is reef safe.
TEC CLARK: That’s, that’s amazing. Now you’ve had, you mentioned the Hawaii, um, success story. There’s others that, you know, I’ve been following you and, and been a consumer of this product as well. Um, and you just keep posting that there are government success stories happening all over the place. Tell us some more about this.
AUTUMN BLUM: So what they’ve learned is that sunscreen pollution really is a symptom of unsustainable tourism. So these communities that, especially the popular tourist destinations are looking at, how do you support your livelihood? We have to protect, you have to protect the reefs if that’s part of your community. And they’re looking at different ways to do that. And eliminating sunscreen, eliminating the harmful sunscreen is one really easy way to protect your reefs.
Hawaii reefs are already rebounding or seeing really positive signs just by taking out in the ban hasn’t even come into effect yet. So it’s pretty cool. Wow, that’s fantastic. Coastal communities around the world are all looking at it. They’re looking at the science and they’re asking the questions and the more they dig into the science, the more onboard they are.
TEC CLARK: Fantastic. Oh, that’s great. That’s great to hear. Sustainability is such a buzzword to right now and it is super important. So how does a dive center benefit from the Stream2Sea brand of products?
AUTUMN BLUM: So we’re working really hard to make this easy for the dive center and the dive professional. Um, it’s, it’s all wrapped up together. We’re trying to make it easy for them to partner with us. Um, we’re giving them discounted bulk product. If they want to offer it for free to their customers on their boat, trying to make it affordable for them, they can sell it in the retail store. We’re giving an excellent, excellent margin on that. Um, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for them to buy in, you know, low minimum orders and trying to work with them on discount and shipping rates and such.
Um, but beyond that, the consumers are looking for it. They’re looking to the dive pros because we are the educators of the sea, right? So looking at us for guidance and they’re actively looking for dive centers and partners that are promoting sustainability. They’re promoting eco-conscious options. Who’s getting rid of the plastic bottles on the boats? Right? Who’s offering the safe sunscreen on board? It’s a selling feature. Good for the planet. It’s good for their bottom line. I mean, I call that a triple win.
TEC CLARK: Absolutely. You know, we’re doing that in our dive program. And so when we’re dealing with college students right now, they’re extraordinarily environmentally conscious, um, much more than some other populations. And so what we’re finding is that we’ve got, um, that in our, items list, you know, items to bring onto the different dive trips, especially for our dive club. Um, we are of course saying bring water, bring blah, blah, blah, all these things a towel, a bathing suit. So you know what, we’ve always had sunscreen in there, but we have, based on this product, all this knowledge that’s come out and, and all of this, we have put that the coral safe sunscreen needs to be there.
That needs to be what they are thinking. We have had a really interesting, you know, once people see that they go, well wait a minute, I didn’t know. And so now the education piece takes place. I think that this is a really important thing that what you’re talking about gets into dive professionals so that when they are teaching courses, every single course we should be teaching some type of conservation or environmental effort in it.
So when we’ve got those specialties out there and we’re talking about this in any course, it doesn’t matter, that this needs to be something that is brought up and our instructors need to be able to talk and talk and say, “Hey, these are the harmful things.” That’s great. So this is not only from what you’ve said here, but are there any type of resources that a dive center could tap into that you have that they could educate a dive pro that they could almost memorize and kind of roll off the tongue very easily about this?
AUTUMN BLUM: Absolutely. So if they reach out to us or go to our website, I believe it’s stream2sea.com/pro . That’s the page that we’re creating pretty much for us, right? For the dive professionals out there. We have our dive brief card up there. It’s just a real easy download. It has some basic talking points. Why do you care? Well, I mean, is my sunscreen really gonna make a difference? The average consumer may say, well yeah guys, 62 parts per trillion of sunscreen is enough to kill coral larva. Well, how much is that? It’s hard to visualize, right? Right. That’s the equivalent of one drop in six Olympic size swimming pools. We give you some of those talking points, right?
How do you find a reef safe sunscreen? Of course I say try mine. If mine is not available, flip it over. Look at those drug facts and make sure it says non-nano titanium dioxide or non-nano zinc oxide. If it doesn’t say only those two in the active ingredients, just don’t use it. It’s not safe.
TEC CLARK: Wow. Right. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. You know I’m thinking about this too is that we’re talking about sunscreen so much, but you’ve also got the other products like you were saying, but um, you know, the bubbles or whatnot could because people are taking a shower and that’s going in. You’ve got a whole other line of other products. I shouldn’t say line. You have more products in the same line.
Um, one of my favorites because I have my wonderfully long hair. Is your leave in conditioner? Oh my gosh. I use it after pool sessions. I use it after dive trips and it has helped me maintain this wonderful mane. So, uh, kudos to you on that. I think that’s awesome. And so what’s the whole product thing on that is also safe, right?
AUTUMN BLUM: Absolutely. Every product in our lines. So the big difference I say between Stream2Sea and everybody else out there that’s slapping a label on the front is we’ve got the testing to prove it. So before launching Stream2Sea, we tested every formula. They’re all readily biodegradable, which means that they will biodegrade in the oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams within 28 days.
All of ours are significantly less. But that’s the standard. And they’re all safe for the aquatic environment, we’ve tested, we won’t harm freshwater fish, saltwater fish or coral larva. And the test results are all on our website. So we kind of put our money where our mouth is. We’ve proven it.
TEC CLARK: Right. That’s awesome. And you’ve also got a new product. Um, the defog, right?
AUTUMN BLUM: Our mask Defog. So, so most people use baby shampoo, right? So if you, if you go into an ecotox lab and you want to find something that’s going to have 100% mortality of fish in a tank grab, an average shampoo, sodium lauryl and laureth sulfate are the two primary ingredients in most baby shampoos out there. And those are the standards that they use for aquatic toxins. So when I say when I made a reef safe sunscreen, it was a challenge. When I made a reef safe shampoo, oh my God, that took months. That was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. Shampoo is really hard. So making this defog that is reef safe was, was really difficult and it works really well. So I’m proud of this formula and we’re excited to launch it this weekend.
TEC CLARK: Oh, that’s so cool to hear. Well tell everybody how they can follow you and connect with you.
AUTUMN BLUM: Absolutely. So connecting with us is easy. Obviously our website stream2sea.com and I say it’s stream like a river, the number two and then sea like the ocean. Dot com. Um, we’re very active on Facebook and Instagram. Both of them would be stream2sea, um, what does that on Instagram they handle stream say. Right. And then if you wanted to find me, it’s autumnS2S on both Facebook and Instagram. And I’d love to connect with, with more divers out there in the world.
TEC CLARK: That’s awesome. Well you can tell, you know, you’ve got such a passion for this, but it’s not only just a passion, it is a background in it. It is, it is scientifically based. You have, you know, your professionalism on this has just been over the top. Just fantastic. Thank you for educating so many people and that’s why I wanted to get you on to, to this podcast so that you could really tell what’s going on out there so that our dive pros know that there is impact if we’re putting on the wrong chemicals and we’re introducing that to the water. This is wonderful. So thank you so much and love having you on the show and all the best at the rest of the show.
AUTUMN BLUM: Thank you Tec and it’s absolutely my pleasure. I like to say that we don’t have customers. We have advocates out there and we’re growing because of the passion of our followers, so thank you.
TEC CLARK: Nice. That’s awesome. All right, have a great one.
AUTUMN BLUM: You too. Thanks so much.
That’s good stuff. Thanks so much, Autumn. Hey, those resources she mentioned are simply awesome. Head over to stream2sea.com that’s S, T, R, E A M, the number two and S E A – stream2sea.com and sign up to be a pro. All right. You’ll get connected with educational resources, samples and discounts. There’s even a list of harmful chemicals. I can’t pronounce any of them, but what you get to do is see what those chemicals are and then also see what they do to your body and what they do to the environment. That’s all listed on there. It’s awesome.
There’s even a blog with research based articles all throughout it. So look, it’s holiday time, right? This is going in stocking stuffers and white elephant holiday parties for sure. You know, for all my dive friends, this is going to be a hit and it is a hit. I give it to students all the time.
Now here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. The sunscreen is concentrated, right? It’s water resistant for over 80 minutes because it’s so concentrated and natural. A little goes a long way. So when you give this as a gift or you’re selling it to someone or you’re giving it as a sample, you need to show people how to use it.
The reason why is that most people lather on sunscreen generously and they just put it all over and rub it in and it’s good, right? If you do that with this product, you’re going to have a very pale skin. You want to use small amounts and you want to work it in. This is just a tip for you. I’ve had students put it on and they have a white face and we just kind of laugh at them and then I realize you know, I should have shown you that there’s a nice way to put this on.
You rub it in and you won’t have a white face, so small amounts and work it in. That’s my tip for you. But it’s just not about coral safe sunscreens in the Stream2Sea product line. It is also other skin and hair care products as well. You’ve got lip balms, you’ve got after sun body lotions, you’ve got the shampoo and the body wash and my favorite, the leave in hair conditioner. I mean it really is amazingly awesome. And another one that I think you’re going to love is a sun and sting relief gel. So you get those little stingies out there, you get a little, a little bit of a jellyfish sting or a hit of a sea lice or whatnot. You’d be amazed at how good the sting relief gel works. So you hear me promoting this stuff, it’s because it really is good stuff.
It really is good stuff. And autumn is an awesome person. Awesome in our industry. She’s so well connected, so well articulate the issues and the need for this product. So I support her, I support this product and her brand. And uh, I just love to see new businesses, entrepreneurial businesses that are doing something good and important.
Hey, and if you heard of or saw a press release come out or a news thing that talked about, “well, are coral reef safe sunscreen’s really a thing?” And you got people that are scientists that are saying, “well maybe it’s not this and not that. And it could be other things.” Wait a minute, let me point this out to you. So first of all, if you think about the cosmetic line, especially sunscreens, do you have a favorite sunscreen? I do. I did, right until this product came along and I would use it all the time.
Why? Cause I loved its smell. I was used to its smell. I, you know, I liked the product. And so there’s brand loyalty. So think about all of the companies that realize that they have to either come into this genre of product or they’re going to lose some customers on a product line that may have been a favorite product line. So you’re going to have cosmetic companies and sunscreen manufacturers actually possibly come out and try to get scientists to say, “Hey, is this the thing?”
Well, they can always point to tons of things. It’s just like down here in South Florida. People could say, “so Tec, why are you so eco-conscious? Why are you, you know, using multi-use a single use bottles over and over, excuse me, multi-use bottles over and over again instead of single use bottles, um, you know, tank tape or you know, sunscreens or whatever it is.”
Anything that I can use to point out to do good for our water environment, I’m going to use it and point it out. Now you could have someone come along and say, “yeah, but see Tec, you know, all those things that you’re doing, they have minimal impact on the reef by comparison to the phosphates coming off the lawns in the fertilized lawns of South Florida on a rainstorm during a runoff that goes from the lawns to the streets to our storm gutters, to our canals, and then out across our reefs twice a day with the tides. Right?
Uh, that’s causing algae and coral destruction.” And on and on and on. Well, there is truth to that, but that doesn’t negate that I’m going to try the best I can as a dive professional to do something good for the environment. A lots of little steps and that is important to me.
It reminds me of the star thrower story. If you haven’t heard this story, it’s the story where a storm happens and thousands and thousands of starfish are washed up on a beach and a child comes out and sees this and he starts taking starfish after starfish and bringing them to the water’s edge and putting them back in the water and throwing them back and tossing them back in. And an old man comes along and says, “you know, why are you doing all this? There’s no way you can save all of them. It doesn’t matter.” And the kids says as he picks up one starfish, “it matters to this one” and he throws it in. Think about that.
What we can do might not be world changing in one fell swoop, but what we can do is make little changes and remember you are a dive pro. You are an influencer in this industry. Be an influencer by sharing what is the right thing to do to be good stewards of this underwater world that we are called to be professionals in. That’s it for today. Everyone.
Thanks For Listening!
Thank you so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher, that way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live. And please leave me a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes page at scubaguru.com and there you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care, my friends.
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