What the Box Promises, and the Small Print Behind It

This is the children's version of Riemann's P20 range, a 200ml cream in a pump bottle rather than the spray many longtime P20 users know. The headline claims are printed right on the front: SPF50+ (rated very high, with PA++++ on the label), protection for up to 10 hours, and water resistance for up to 3 hours. The packaging also shows a superior UVA star rating, and the listing states the formula delivers at least twice Europe's required UVA protection.

For sensitive young skin, the box stacks up a decent set of credentials: hypoallergenic and fragrance free, dermatologically tested, Allergy Certified, vegan friendly and EcoSun Pass approved. It's marked suitable for children aged 1 and up, and the listing flags a detail worth knowing: the bottle carries a PAO (period after opening) symbol of 12 months rather than an expiry date, so the clock starts when you first open it.

Two label-level caveats before the praise starts. Both durability claims say "up to", and Riemann's own instructions still matter: several happy reviewers stress applying well before going out and letting it dry properly. The brand has been making sun protection since 1979 according to the packaging, and the kids formula is the same once-a-day concept as the adult range, thickened into a cream that's easier to track on a wriggling child.

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The Once-a-Day Test: School Runs, Theme Parks and 40 Degree Holidays

The reason this cream commands a premium is simple: parents apply it once and stop thinking about it. A dozen of the 100 reviews come from families of redheads or the notably fair-skinned, and they are the most devoted buyers here. Sally, who has "a very fair child who burns through all other brands of suncream", calls it "the ONLY suncream he has never burned through", even on the beach and at the paddling pool. Vicki puts it on her red-haired seven-year-old before school: "I put this on him in the morning and it lasts all day!"

The school angle comes up repeatedly. Fozzy39 sends her eldest to school wearing it precisely because "staff won't/can't apply suncream for the children", and JH relies on it for a son who spends most of the school day outside, eczema and all. Shelly jone gives it the toughest test in the set: three kids, two blonde and one ginger with "palest skin", two full days at Drayton Manor on the hottest day of the year with barely any shade. Two to three applications across the whole day and, in her words, "not one of my kids got sun burnt", while friends' children using supermarket creams burned despite more frequent top-ups.

Holiday reports push it harder still. Sophie grew up in Barbados being covered in P20 by her own parents, and now uses it on her one and three-year-old: "We apply it in the morning and forget about it - no reapplying, no stopping them having fun, no timing, no worrying." Her kids have been in midday sun over 40°C without burning. Dean Ashurst used it through a Cyprus heatwave with his boys in the pool all day and reported no sunburn at all. On the water resistance specifically, one Kindle Customer summed it up: "doesn't wash off in the sea or swimming pool". And for sheer parental candour, Gella's five-star review is the best thing in the set: P20 won't fix your other worries about your kids, but "Apply > Dry > Apply and go" removes the sunburn one.

Worth noting: plenty of adults in the reviews use the kids version themselves, several preferring the trackable white cream to the original oily spray. One sensitive-skinned reviewer applied it twice across nine hours at an airshow and didn't burn or tan.

The Staining Question: Eleven Reviews, Two Fixes and a Bleach Warning

Now the trade-off. Eleven of the 100 reviews mention clothing stains, and it is comfortably the most common complaint in the set. Charlotte, who otherwise rates the cream for protecting her little ones through a heatwave, warns that "it's turned the white school tops yellow even with stain remover in the wash so beware!" John owen reports it "stains all the kids clothing a green colour". Two of the ten one-star reviews are purely about laundry: Leanne wrote "This ruined my son's school clothes. Horrible yellow stains would not come off", and Isabela couldn't shift the marks even with Vanish and sun-bleaching.

The experienced P20 users in the reviews treat this as a known tax with known workarounds. Fix one: timing. Shelly jone applies 30 to 40 minutes before her kids get dressed, and Nicola black, whose whole family used it all summer without burns, says to put it on first thing and let it fully dry in, adding that this cream actually stains less than the oil-based original P20. Marie says the same: let it dry before the clothes go on. Fix two comes from Sophie, and it's the single most useful sentence in all 100 reviews: the stains come out if you soak the clothes in Head & Shoulders shampoo.

One warning deserves its own line. DarkAngel found that putting bleach on white fabric that has touched this cream makes the marks react and turn red. So: no bleach on the school shirts, shampoo soak instead. And for balance, it isn't universal. Neil applied it to his daughter for a full day out and reported it rubbed in well and left no marks on her clothes at all.

The Ten One-Star Reviews, Read One by One

Ten of the 100 reviews are one star, and since the whole product rests on trust, they deserve proper scrutiny rather than a hand-wave. Here's the full breakdown. Two are the laundry disasters covered above. One is blank, with no text at all. One is the pump: Purple found the mechanism started sticking partway through the bottle and ended up having to "cut container in half with a Stanley knife and scrape out the remaining cream", estimating around 150ml was left trapped inside. One is shelf life: Eileen reported "Bought it last summer and it's now gone off and stinks!", which is where that 12-month period-after-opening symbol becomes more than small print.

The serious ones are the burns. Matthew buchanan had used P20 before without issue, bought it on Amazon for the first time, applied more often than instructed and his child still burned; he openly questioned whether the tube was the real thing. Another parent reported both children, aged 5 and 2, "absolutely red raw and burned after two hours of being outside". Counting across all star levels, five of the 100 reviews describe someone still catching the sun, including a two-star family who burned in Turkey despite following the instructions after using it happily in the UK, and a three-star mum whose fair-haired toddler went pink after multiple applications.

Then there's skin tone, which the marketing doesn't address: HoneyB found it left a white cast on her dark skin, and Efox79 gave two stars because it "does not accommodate brown skin as it leaves a grey colour even after rubbing it in". If your family has deeper skin tones, this thick white cream is probably the wrong pick. Reactions were rarer than you might expect for a sensitive-skin product, but not zero: one parent bought it specifically to avoid the rashes other creams caused, and instead his son's "skin comes out all red and he starts itching and scratching away".

One housekeeping note on the review set: a few reviews on this listing clearly reference other P20 formats, like the original spray, so Amazon appears to pool some reviews across the range. Where a complaint was really about expecting the spray and receiving cream, we've treated it as variant confusion rather than a fault of this product. Set against 2,977 ratings averaging 4.7, this is a normal failure rate for sun cream, but the pattern is clear: when P20 works, it works spectacularly, and when it doesn't, parents feel burned in both senses. Our advice is the boring kind: test it on a normal garden day before you stake a fortnight in Spain on it.

How Far 200ml Goes, and What It Costs to Run

More than twenty of the 100 reviews bring up the price, and almost all land on some version of "expensive but worth it". Beccadoodle knocked a star off purely for cost despite the cream stopping her daughter's prickly heat. The interesting split is over how far the bottle stretches. Three reviews complain it ran out fast: Ian Jeakins covered his wife and 13-month-old once a day and "It ran out after 3 days", another family emptied most of a bottle in three pool days across two kids, and Mrs N. ran dry before the end of her holiday, noting the cream felt thicker than previous batches.

The defenders' maths runs the other way: because you apply once a day instead of every two hours, a bottle covers more days than the same volume of a standard SPF, and one all-ginger family reckoned that despite costing more than Aldi's cream, it probably works out cheaper in the long run. Sophia, who buys it for her kids every summer, added a practical point: "Also cheaper on here than in shops". She's not alone; multiple reviewers bought through Amazon specifically because it undercut Boots and the high street at the time. Prices move around, so check today's price on Amazon rather than taking anyone's word for it, and if you're covering multiple children for a full summer, budget for more than one bottle.

Final Word: For Fair-Skinned Families, Little Else Comes Close

We rate Riemann P20 Kids SPF50+ at 4.4 out of 5. The core promise, one morning application that protects a child through a school day or a pool day, is confirmed over and over by the people best placed to judge: parents of ginger, pale and sensitive-skinned kids who have burned through every supermarket alternative. The certifications (fragrance free, hypoallergenic, Allergy Certified, vegan) are the kind that matter on young skin, and the once-a-day routine removes the single biggest failure point of children's sun protection, which is the top-up that never happens.

Buy it if your child is fair, sensitive-skinned or at school all day where nobody will reapply. Skip it if your family has darker skin tones, since two reviewers found it leaves a grey or white cast, and go in with eyes open on the laundry: apply it 30 to 40 minutes before clothes go on, never bleach the stains, and keep Head & Shoulders on standby. Respect the 12-month period after opening rather than carrying a bottle over two summers, and do one trial run before a big holiday. Do all that, and you get what most of these 100 reviewers got: a summer where sunburn simply stopped being one of the things you worry about.