Ethyl ferulate (ethyl 4-hydroxy-3-methoxycinnamate) is currently used as a sunscreening agent in commercial sunscreen blends. Recent time-resolved gas-phase measurements have demonstrated that it possesses long-lived (> ns) electronic excited states, counterintuitive to what one might anticipate for an effective sunscreening agent. In the present work, the photodynamics of ethyl ferulate in cyclohexane, are explored using time-resolved transient electronic absorption spectroscopy, upon photoexcitation to the line and 1(1)pi pi*and 2(1)pi pi* states. We demonstrate that ethyl ferulate undergoes efficient non-radiative decay to repopulate the electronic ground state, mediated by trans-cis isomerization. These results strongly suggest that even mild perturbations induced by a non-polar solvent, as may be found in a closer-to-market sunscreen blend, may contribute to our understanding of ethyl ferulate's role as a sunscreening agent. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.