As he sped down snow-covered mountains in the Rockies, the Alps, and the Dolomites over the past several years, ski champion and Olympic gold medalist Lucas Pinheiro Braathen wasn’t just focused on winning medals. He was also evaluating over 30 iterations of a new sunscreen that his high-end skin-care brand, Octo, will release this month.

But rather than describing it as a distraction, the 26-year-old—who in February became the first Brazilian athlete and the first competitor from any tropical nation to win a medal at a Winter Olympics—says the testing felt like a natural extension of competing.

“I love ski racing because it’s such a complex sport,” Pinheiro Braathen says on a video call in March, shortly after winning another gold medal at the FIS Alpine World Cup. “It’s a sport with so many factors that come into this, like, one and a half minutes of performance, where you should be on the right side of the clock by a hundredth of a second.” After every race, his team analyzes a litany of granular data points, including which skis performed best on what kind of snow and which garments correlated with faster results. “I am kind of the person who gets to put all of these ideas to the test and say, ‘Does this actually give us that thing that we feel we’re missing?’ ” he adds.

The athlete himself is central to the formula—the products are developed around his lifestyle and career. “He’s somebody who’s exposed to UV radiation at the highest level…. He’s literally on top of mountains,” says Ted Gushue, who cofounded Octo along with Mads Hansen and Adam Klausner. “So, if it works for him, well, it’ll work for you.”

The final version, which Pinheiro Braathen tested on icy mountains in winter and on sweaty runs in summer, follows Octo’s guiding principle of maximum impact with a minimum of ingredients. Like its first product, a moisturizer released in December 2025, the new SPF 60 has only eight components. Key among them is zinc oxide, which provides the broadest range of protection against UV rays of any sunscreen agent available. It also includes botanicals sourced from the Amazon—in a nod to Pinheiro Braathen’s heritage—that deliver antioxidants and support the skin’s microbiome.

The first people who’ll get to put it to the test are members of the Metropolitan Golf Association, which will begin distributing it this month, before it’s available for sale online in June. (“It’s going in a staggering amount of pro shops all around America,” Gushue notes.) And though it’s a wildly different sport, Pinheiro Braathen says the partnership makes sense, given how much sun exposure golfers get. “[It’s] a more, let’s say, accessible sport than skiing… but it is still one that is out in nature, exposed to the outdoors across various conditions,” he says. “The purpose of the brand is to inspire people to reconnect with the richness and simplicity of nature.” Which sounds like a winning strategy.