Colour-changing marker alerts users to reapply sunscreen

A special ink may one day help protect you from sunburn, say students at the University of Waterloo who still need to tweak the formula and prove its safety to regulators.

The prototype invention is a marker with ink that is designed to change colour to indicate when to reapply sunscreen.

The nanotechnology engineers were fed up with getting sunburned. After checking with their professors, they started a company called Suncayr, which this week was one of the international runners-up in the 2014 James Dyson Award for design.

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Watch CBC-TV's Kim Brunhuber get a demonstration of how the product works before and after exposure to UV light.