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Why 30% of what we make goes to coral reef restoration this month
- Ava at play
- Mar 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 18
At play launches this month. And to celebrate, we’re donating 30% of everything you buy this month to restoring coral reefs with coastal impact.
I came to the east coast of Tamil Nadu to surf.
Instead, I found myself dealing with white patches across my skin after every long session in the sun: an autoimmune response triggered by UV exposure. Every sunscreen I tried washed off, stung, or failed by noon.
Nothing was built for someone who actually spends their life in the water.
So I spent my evenings doing what unconventional founders do: obsessing over a problem no one had solved for me. Reading ingredient labels. Mixing batches. Testing them the next morning in the ocean. Starting again.
The tin that eventually worked sat by my door with no label. Just something I grabbed on the way to the water.
Then a friend asked to try it. Then another. Then the whole surf school was paddling out in what we started calling, half-jokingly, Sun Mud (now summer mud).
Over six years, Sun Mud walked itself across India. Swimmers doing early morning laps. Cricketers in the field. Tennis coaches baking courtside all summer. None of them surfed. None of them were who I made it for. But they all had the same problem: hours under a brutal sun, and nothing on the market built to last it.
Every month, we sold out.
Then I found out something that made me stop everything.
The sunscreen thousands of people were trusting on their skin every day had never been scientifically tested. I didn't know the actual SPF. I didn't know if it was stable after six months on a shelf. I didn't know what the ingredients were doing once they hit the ocean.
I had built something people loved. I had no idea if it was protecting them.
And I wasn't alone. I was just one person in a much larger, much quieter problem.
Because the market was, and still is, full of products like mine.
Homemade sunscreens sold as natural, organic, reef-safe. Labels chosen not for accuracy, but for how they make ocean-conscious buyers feel. Labels that sidestep the regulatory standards every real sunscreen has to meet. And in some cases, labels hiding something most buyers would never think to ask about — whether the product in their hands is even safe to put on their skin.
The reef-safe claim. The organic claim. I had believed in both of them.
Both turned out to be more complicated than I thought.
In Sunscreens, "Reef-Safe" Is Marketing and "Organic" a compliance Loophole.
Reef-safe. It's on hundreds of products. It feels responsible. There's just one problem: the phrase has no scientific definition. No regulation. No standard to meet. It is, as researchers increasingly note, a marketing claim dressed as an ecological one.
The pivot to zinc oxide — sold as the ocean-conscious alternative to chemical filters — doesn't hold up either.
Laboratory studies on Acropora corals found that zinc oxide trigger coral bleaching, by breaking the bond between coral and the algae that keep it alive. Some products explicitly labelled "reef-safe" and built around zinc oxide showed severely negative effects on corals — while certain products with chemical UV filters caused mild or no effects at all.
The label is not the science.
Now the second lie. The one closer to your skin:
Organic. Natural. Clean.
In skincare, these words are almost entirely unregulated. What organic often means in practice — especially in small-batch and homemade products — is that synthetic preservatives have been left out. The same preservatives that stop mould growing in a product sitting in a humid bathroom for six months.
Without them, without stability testing, without batch documentation, you don't have a clean product. You have an expiry date nobody calculated.
And without SPF validation, you don't have sun protection. You have a number someone chose.
Sunscreen alone won't save coral reefs. But every industry has a responsibility to its ecosystem. Outdoor culture like surfing, diving, swimming exists because these ecosystems exist.
We Didn't Launch Until We Could Prove It
When I stopped selling Sunmmer mud, I didn't know what came next. I just knew I couldn't keep selling something I couldn't prove worked.
So I started again from scratch.
Labs across India. Prototype after prototype. Each one sent for clinical testing and stability trials. Each one failing in ways that taught me something new. I was looking not just for something that worked, but for whether better alternatives even existed. Different bases, different mineral profiles, different preservation systems. Some promising. Most not ready. Some still in development.
UV protection isn't something you feel your way toward. It has to be proven, batch by batch, under controlled conditions.
Two years later, what came out the other side surprised even me.
A shelf-stable formula. Clinically tested. FDA approved. Roughly 60% less carbon embodiment than the sports sunscreens currently sold in India and globally.
India's first FDA approved beeswax sunscreen.
Not a paste. Not a balm. Not a loophole.
The real thing. Finally.
30% of what we make goes to the sea
I'm not going to tell you At Play is reef-safe. I don't think that label means what it's supposed to mean. And after everything I've just told you, I hope you don't either.
What I can tell you is this: we know we have a footprint. And until we can honestly say otherwise, we're going to own it and offset it.
Coastal Impact does something simple and radical. They go underwater and rebuild what we destroyed. Structures anchored to the seabed. Coral fragments attached by hand. Cleaning dives. Monitoring dives. Watching fish return to places that went quiet. It is slow, physical, unglamorous work. A living city, rebuilt one fragment at a time.
This is where 30% of every purchase goes this month.
Not to a fund. Not to an offset certificate. To people getting in the water and doing the work.
Buy Summer mud this month. 30% goes directly to Coastal Impact.
The ocean has been generous with us. Let's return the favour.
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