mycar re-skinned a car interior in synthetic skin that burns in the sun

Sun safety messaging in Australia is relentlessly outdoor-focused — hats, sunscreen and shade at the beach or park — yet Australians clock on average 12,000 km a year behind the wheel, and mycar's commissioned research found 92% consider themselves sun safe while 72% overlook protection the moment they start driving. The common belief that a car shields you is literally false: car windows block most UVB but let UVA straight through, driving cumulative DNA damage and ageing without any visible burn.

Advertising the in-car risk the normal way means trying to out-shout every beach and holiday PSA with more statistics in another awareness film — the exact habit the target audience has already tuned out. The problem was not ignorance of the word 'sun', it was that the danger is invisible and slow, so a message that only says 'wear sunscreen' changes nothing.

TBWA\Eleven Australia and mycar re-upholstered a car's entire interior in synthetic human skin, built by the Oscar- and BAFTA-winning prosthetics studio Odd Studio and advised by a burns-reconstructive surgeon, with each freckle, mole and hair separately applied along the Fitzpatrick scale to feel like real Australasian skin. Placed at Circular Quay in Sydney, the interior visibly reacted to UV: as sunlight hit it, the skin began to burn and blister, staging the cumulative UVA damage drivers wrongly believe the cabin is protecting them from.

Re-upholstered a car's interior in synthetic skin that visibly burns in sunlight, staging the damage drivers can't see on the object they trust to protect them.

Synthetic skin converts decades of invisible UVA damage into a visible burn in one afternoon.

The car, normally seen as shelter, becomes exposed flesh, reversing the audience's mental model.

Live demonstration in real sunlight lets viewers supply the emotional force without an authority figure.

Free UV-sensitive stickers extend the proof from one car to 55,000 daily cars, keeping the reminder active.

To make an invisible hazard tangible, stage it on the object people trust to protect them, using a material that visibly reacts to the hazard.

Won a Gold Lion and Silver at Cannes 2026 (per Campaign Brief). Figures are the brand's own survey — written as the campaign's claim. Re-skinning a trusted object in the material the hazard thins is a template other durable-goods brands can steal: the moment a product that people wrongly treat as shelter becomes the demonstration surface, the user confronts the damage on the very thing they trusted — and the manufacturer gives away a cheap detector (the UV sticker) that keeps the reminder live long after the stunt hatches.