There is recently increasing evidence that the dominating first impact of sun exposure toward the skin is the free radical production, which can be directly measured on living skin by ESR spectroscopy.A two step method is employed to determine ex vivo the new global sun protection index ≫Integrated SPF (ISPF)≪.In a first part, the relationship between UV dose and the amount of generated free radicals is established on unprotected skin.In a second part, a sunscreen product is spread on skin at 2 mg/cm2.Accordingly, a protection factor could be calculated as ratio of required UV doses to reach a same free radical production with and without sunscreen using the - well established methodol. - of traditional SPF calculationCompared to the traditional SPF, the UVA filter efficacies are considered by the new protection factor: ISPF value dramatically drop down when the UVA filtration is not correctly balanced to the UVB filtration.Different com. sunscreen products were tested, showing the relevance of the method to fully characterize their performance in term of sun protection.Experiments show that ex vivo human skin can be replaced by pig ears skin.The ISPF gives a real indication of the total protective effect of a sunscreen product as it covers any possible creation of free radicals over the total sun spectrum applied and also takes into account the stability of the irradiated protective mols.