Ten Commonly Available Medicinal Plants in Malaysia with Potential Sun Protection Factor and Antioxidant Properties – A Review

Background: Malaysia has a diverse range of medicinal plants that utilized to make effective nutritional, folk medicine, and cosmetic preparations. Natural antioxidants obtained from medicinal plant extracts have recently gained popularity as protective ingredients in sunscreen formulations due to their safety, wide range of biological effects on skin, and environmental sustainability in absorbing Ultraviolet (UV) radiation and preventing skin damage. Prolonged exposure to UV rays may cause skin damages like sunburn, photoaging, erythema, edema, wrinkle, and skin cancer. Natural sunscreen products are becoming more popular among consumers who are becoming more aware of the risks of excessive UV and chemicals in beauty and personal care products. Objective: This review aimed to provide brief information about ten commonly available medicinal plants in Malaysia with potential sun protection factor and antioxidant properties. Methods: In the present review, the relevant literatures were an extensive search from various scientific database including Pubmed, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and Scopus. Ten commonly available medicinal plants in Malaysia such as Graptophyllum pictum, Moringa oleifera, Mangifera indica, Zanthoxylum rhetsa, Andrographis paniculata, Sonneratia caseolaris, Camellia sinensis, Morinda citrifolia, Nephelium lappaceum and Murraya koenigii were included based on its potential sun protection factor (SPF) and antioxidant properties. Results: All the ten medicinal plants reported in this review found to have potential antioxidant activities due to the presence of phenolic and flavonoid content in the extracts. All of these findings well correlated to their potential SPF. The M. indica extracts had the highest SPF value among the ten plant extracts reported in this review, with a value of ≥30. This is considered high sun protection action. Extracts of A. paniculata, M. citrifolia, C. sinensis, and G. pictum have a moderate photoprotective effect (SPF value of ≥15). Sun protection activity was low in M. oleifera and S. caseolaris (SPF value ≤ 2). Conclusion: The identification of natural antioxidant and photoprotective ingredients from medicinal plants has demonstrated as a potential natural sunscreen product in protecting UV radiation against damaging UV rays, and therefore recommended to utilize them to replace synthetic chemicals in cosmetics development in the future.