The Miami Pharmacist Who Invented Suntan Lotion — And the Irony Nobody Talks About
Luana B. Gann, Editor
8/27/2026
I want to tell you about a man named Benjamin Green, because I genuinely think his story is one of the strangest, most quietly Florida things I've come across in a long time — and I say that as someone who has now written about manatees, fire ants, and a horse capital in the same handful of months.
Here's the setup: a Miami Beach pharmacist accidentally invents the product that will define an entire generation of American summers. He builds it out of, among other things, veterinary petroleum jelly. He tests it by putting it on his own head and standing in his kitchen, actually cooking the mixture on his wife's stove. And decades later, the very state where he dreamed this up ends up carrying one of the highest rates of the exact disease his invention was, at least in theory, supposed to help prevent. That's not a tidy story. It's a genuinely human one, with real irony baked into it, and I think it deserves to be told honestly rather than as a cute "did you know" fact.
In This Article
A Pharmacist, an Airman, and a Very Strange Recipe
Benjamin Green wasn't sitting in a lab somewhere dreaming up a beauty product. He was serving in World War II, and according to The New Tropic's detailed account of his story, he was genuinely alarmed by how badly the sun was hurting the men serving alongside him. Sunburn wasn't a minor annoyance out there — it could take a soldier out of commission just as effectively as an injury could, and Green, being a pharmacist by training, apparently couldn't just watch that happen without trying to fix it.
So he did something about it, and what he came up with first was genuinely unusual. He created something called "Red Vet Pet" — short for red veterinary petrolatum — a thick, waterproof substance originally meant for treating animals, according to reporting on the product's earliest days. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't marketed. It was a wartime fix, made from whatever actually worked, by a man who happened to have the pharmaceutical know-how to try.
I think that detail matters more than people give it credit for. This wasn't invented in a boardroom chasing a market opportunity. It was invented by someone trying to keep the people around him from suffering, using the only tools he had access to at the time. That's a genuinely different origin story than most consumer products get to claim.
The Stovetop Experiment That Actually Happened
After the war, Green came home to Miami Beach and kept tinkering — and this is the part of the story I find myself thinking about most, because it's so specific and so unglamorous that it has to be true.
According to Pharmacy Times' account of the product's development, Green refined his original formula by adding cocoa butter and coconut oil — the ingredients that would eventually give Coppertone its signature scent, the one that, even now, decades later, people say instantly transports them back to a specific beach vacation. He tested the improved formula himself, reportedly cooking it up right there in his own kitchen, using his wife's oven as his actual laboratory.
There's something genuinely charming about that image to me — a grown man in 1944, standing over a stove in a Miami Beach apartment, trying to get the ratio of coconut oil to cocoa butter exactly right, with absolutely no idea that he was building the foundation of a product that would eventually generate $9 billion in annual global revenue, according to Coppertone's own corporate history as documented on Wikipedia. He wasn't thinking about billions. He was thinking about not getting sunburned on Miami Beach, and about helping other people not get sunburned either. The scale of what it became came later, and honestly, probably surprised him more than anyone.
How a Girl and a Dog Took Over America
If you're picturing Coppertone right now, I'd bet real money you're picturing the little girl with the puppy pulling down her swimsuit bottoms, revealing a tan line. That image has been genuinely inescapable in American advertising since 1959, and its actual origin story is, in its own way, just as human and small-scale as Green's kitchen experiments.
The illustration was created by an artist named Joyce Ballantyne Brand, and according to an NPR interview with her daughter, the model for that iconic little girl was actually Joyce's own daughter, Cheri, who posed for the ad at just three years old. I love that detail. This wasn't a corporate casting call producing a manufactured icon — it was a mother painting her own child, who then spent the rest of her life being, in some sense, the most famous toddler in American advertising history, without ever really choosing that.
Joyce herself had built a career as a pin-up artist through the 1940s, at a time when it was genuinely difficult for a woman to get real recognition in that field. She was one of five artists considered for the national Coppertone campaign, and she won. That's a whole separate, quietly remarkable story sitting right next to Green's — two people, a pharmacist and an illustrator, neither one setting out to build an American icon, both accidentally doing exactly that within the same product.
The Twist Nobody Puts in the Nostalgia Piece
Here's where I want to slow down, because this is the part of the story that most retro-nostalgia pieces about Coppertone conveniently skip past, and I don't think that's fair to the full picture.
Coppertone, in its earliest decades, was marketed almost entirely as a suntan lotion — a product designed to help you tan better, faster, and more evenly, not a product designed to protect you from skin damage the way we understand sunscreen today. According to America Comes Alive's history of sunscreen's development, the entire scientific framework we now rely on — the SPF rating system, the understanding of UVA versus UVB rays — didn't really solidify until decades later, and the FDA didn't begin formally regulating sunscreens as protective products until 1978, according to Pharmacy Times' reporting. For most of Coppertone's early life, the goal on the label wasn't "protect your skin." It was "get a better tan." Those are not the same goal, and I think it's worth being honest about that gap.
And here's the part that genuinely stopped me while researching this: Florida — the exact state where this product was invented, on the exact beach it was invented for — now carries one of the highest melanoma rates in the entire country. A peer-reviewed study published through the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central archive found that Florida has the second-highest melanoma incidence of any state in the nation. Nationally, melanoma now accounts for an estimated 112,000 new cases annually, according to the National Cancer Institute's SEER program, with a lifetime diagnosis risk of roughly 2.2% for men and women combined.
I don't say any of this to villainize Benjamin Green, or to suggest his invention was some kind of mistake. It wasn't. Sunscreen, used correctly and with modern SPF science behind it, is a genuinely important protective tool — the same NIH-backed research shows early-detected melanoma carries a 94.7% five-year survival rate, dropping dramatically the longer detection is delayed. The tools we have now, built on the foundation Green laid decades ago, are genuinely good tools. What I find worth sitting with is simpler: the exact place that built America's relationship with sun-soaked, deeply tanned summers is now living with the long-term cost of that relationship in a way that feels almost too on-the-nose to be a coincidence.
What I Think This Story Actually Means for Us Now
I've thought about this a lot since I started digging into Green's story, and here's where I've landed: I don't think this is a cautionary tale about a bad invention. I think it's a genuinely honest story about how our understanding of our own bodies changes faster than our habits do.
Benjamin Green built something real, out of real need, using the best knowledge available to him in 1944. Decades of science moved forward from there — better formulas, real UV protection, an entirely different understanding of what the sun actually does to skin over a lifetime. But the culture around tanning, the aesthetic we built around bronzed skin and long beach days, kept moving at its own pace, sometimes lagging well behind what the science was quietly telling us the whole time.
That gap — between what we knew and what we kept doing anyway — is, I think, the real story hiding inside the Coppertone Girl's nostalgic little smile. It's not really about a lotion. It's about how long it takes a culture to catch up to its own science, even when the evidence is being generated in the same sand the whole culture keeps returning to, year after year, generation after generation.
Wear your SPF. Reapply it more than you think you need to. And maybe give a little bit of thought, next time you're slathering on something that smells like coconut, to the Miami pharmacist standing over his wife's stove in 1944, trying his best with what he knew at the time — same as all of us, honestly, are still doing right now.
A Quick Note: Melanoma statistics reflect publicly reported research current as of the publish date and are for general informational purposes only. This is not medical advice. If you have concerns about skin cancer risk or need a skin screening, please consult a licensed dermatologist.
Sources
The New Tropic — How a Miami Pharmacist Invented the First Sunscreen
Pharmacy Times — Coppertone Owes Its Success to a Pharmacist
America Comes Alive — The Invention of Sunscreen
Wikipedia — Coppertone (sunscreen)
NPR — The Artist Behind the Coppertone Girl Ad
PubMed Central (NIH) — Comparison of Florida Skin Cancer Screening Rates
National Cancer Institute (SEER) — Cancer Stat Facts: Melanoma of the Skin
Florida Current covers lifestyle, outdoor life, current topics, weather and everything that comes with living in the Sunshine State. Browse our Florida Living section for regional guides, seasonal activity calendars, retirement guides and practical advice from people who actually live here.
Florida native Luana B. Gann brings more than 30 years of publishing, editing, and journalism experience to Florida Current. With a deep appreciation for the Sunshine State's culture, lifestyle, and ever-changing landscape, she is dedicated to helping readers discover what's new, noteworthy, and uniquely Florida.
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