The market is flooded with skincare products, and many consumers find themselves overwhelmed by too many choices. Now add Skintellectualism, whereby people are increasingly educated and savvy about ingredients and looking for solutions to specific skin care issues. This is a key driver for the trend that consumers no longer trust content with generalizations and indefinite promises and feel like their skincare needs are not being met.
Consumers are constantly looking for the next fountain of youth and are willing to spend more on higher-quality skincare products to find it. But, they want ingredients that deliver real and tangible results.
Almost every new beauty company talks about the science involved in their products. Science usually conveys a meaning of performance. Beauty brands are challenged, therefore, with offering their customers innovative products that meet their demand for real results. Formulators and chemists are tasked to develop unique skincare formulations that differentiate from the “noise” in the market.
Jump over to the world of high-tech, and consumers are constantly looking for the latest and greatest in smart devices. What makes the next smart device even smarter? New technology.
Why not apply that same thinking to our own industry? How do we make our formulations “smarter,” harder-working, and providing the kind of real results consumers desire?
Traci Cassell, vice president, Anti-Aging for Coast Southwest, brings an expertise and focus in personal care specialty ingredients, expanding Coast Southwest’s strategic emphasis on innovative anti-aging and skincare solutions. With strong experience in all phases of product marketing and brand building, Traci collaborates with chemists, formulators, and product development teams at our customers and suppliers, as well as Coast Southwest’s sales and technical support teams, to advance ingredient innovation in personal care applications.
Advanced ingredient technology
How do you make a formulation smarter? Biotech companies, such as Infinitec Activos, located in the Barcelona Science Park, develop cutting-edge ingredient technology by leveraging science and research from other industries and applying it to cosmetics. What’s been a reality in pharmaceuticals is now a reality in cosmetics, as we can boost efficacy with measurable precision.
One of these advancements is cosmetic delivery systems, which is the technology developed to incorporate, integrate, protect, and stabilize the active ingredients within a skincare, personal care, or cosmetic product. Thanks to incredible innovations in delivery system technology, the most effective systems are now able to allow the actives to function at the highest capacity and deliver the absolute best results. Especially since the way actives are delivered is one of the most critical components in ensuring overall functionality and performance of a product.
Infinitec’s delivery systems take tried-and-true ingredients that consumers know and want in their skincare products, such as Peptides, Retinol and Vitamin C, and drive them to perform smarter in formulations. Active delivery systems allow formulators to create unique formulations with enhanced skin penetration, efficacy, stability, and bioavailability.
It’s this integration of active ingredients that make cosmetic delivery systems so vitally important to product formulations. Active ingredients rely on innovative, effective delivery systems to make good on the claims found on skincare, personal care, or beauty product labels.
Offering innovative ingredient technology must also be accompanied by substantiated scientific data. With stricter regulations and regulatory trends, obviously, stability testing is a must, but so are in vivo and in vitro testing to support the claims and benefits being made. In fact, Infinitec applies at least 21 different parameters for each new delivery system they launch. This gives formulators confidence they’re using state-of-art ingredient technology, backed by science.
Less is more
By using advanced delivery systems, formulators no longer need to load up formulations with high usage levels in order to create efficacious products. Lower doses mean the potential for irritation to skin, and stability issues, are drastically lessened. It also creates cost-effectiveness. And it also ties into the “less is more” movement among consumers.
What does advanced ingredient technology mean for the beauty industry?
Consumers want products with real results and the confidence knowing that their investment is worth it. Formulators want to develop innovative formulations with the assurance that they’re using the newest ingredient technology supported by science. Beauty brands want to differentiate themselves by offering breakthrough products that deliver performance and visible results, building a foundation of customer confidence and loyalty.
Science is the key to developing advanced ingredient technology, which creates smarter formulations delivering real results. The future of beauty depends on science.
