The preparation of sunblocks with dispersion stability, ultraviolet blocking, and photocompatibility remains a considerable challenge. Plant-derived natural polymers, such as cellulose nanofibers (CNF), show versatile traits, including long aspect ratio, hydrophilic nature, resource abundance, and low material cost. In the present study, a facile and cost-effective strategy is reported for the fabrication of nanostructured inorganic materials by incorporating natural polymers as interspersed, systematically nanosized titanium dioxide (TiO2) particles onto CNF. Among all experiments, the optimized TiO2@CNF3 showed higher ultraviolet blocking performance and less whitening effect. The outstanding performance is attributed to the engineering of equally dispersed nano-sized TiO2 particles on the CNF surface and stable dispersion. Significantly, TiO2@CNF3 exhibited excellent compatibility with avobenzone (80%), an oil-soluble ingredient used in sunblock products, illustrating the photoprotection enhancement under ultraviolet A (UVA) and ultraviolet B (UVB). Moreover, only 14.8% rhodamine B (Rho-B) dye degraded through photocatalytic oxidation process with the TiO2@CNF3, which is negligible photocatalytic activity compared to that of TiO2 (95% dye degraded). Furthermore, commercial inorganic and organic sunblock products with SPF lifetimes of 35+ and 50+ were modified using CNF, significantly enhancing the transmittance performance compared to that of the pure sunblock. However, it was also observed that hydrophilic CNF tended to demulsify the creams due to electrostatic disequilibrium. This CNF-based modified TiO2 system is a new window to replace effective sunblock products in high-value-added applications, such as cosmetics.
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