The beauty and personal care (BPC) industry is experiencing a transformative shift, driven by two key factors that are reshaping its landscape. The first is that consumers expect that the BPC products they purchase are inherently sustainable, and brands have clear and verifiable sustainability practices in place. While sustainability continues to influence today’s consumer preferences, we mustn’t forget that we’re also catering to a newer generation. Gen Alpha, a digital-first generation, born between 2010 and 2025 will be the most diverse generation that will hold brands to higher standards of sustainability.

As consumer awareness of this space continues to grow, sustainability will become more defined and grow in scope to encompass the entire life-cycle of the product including natural origin, carbon emissions and biodegradability. This goes beyond products and product claims; consumers expect brands and their suppliers to align with their personal values, where sustainability is a significant factor.

The second factor is that consumers have repeatedly shown that they expect brands to deliver on sustainability without compromising performance, and largely without compromising cost as well. Consistent performance reinforces consumer’s confidence and encourage them to continue using and repurchasing the product. They count on us as an industry to deliver the efficacy they expect based on the sustainable values they take for granted.

This shift poses a conundrum for brands and ingredient manufacturers alike that lack tools to deliver on both these requirements, especially when it comes to many of the functional ingredients that are the building blocks of BPC products. Yet, this challenge also presents opportunities. New advances in biotechnology have the potential to allow the BPC industry to break this trade-off between performance and sustainability.

The Challenge

Resolving this dilemma cannot be achieved with the technology we have today. Many of the high-performance ingredients in the industry currently do not have a sufficiently high natural origin to facilitate a transition from synthetic solutions. Additionally, many of the ingredients we depend on do not possess the required level of biodegradability to meet consumer and regulatory demands. Kline[GD1] estimates that less than 15% of conditioning polymers used in BPC in 2021 were derived natural (i.e. natural origin > 50%) with the remainder non-natural, and less than 0,1% of rheology modifiers were natural (i.e. natural origin = 100%), with a more respectable 55% as derived natural (1).

Biotechnology can break the trade-off

This is changing. The BPC industry has seen a dramatic growth in natural ingredients over the past years, but natural ingredients alone will not solve this issue. For example, while there has recently been much progress in the use of different gums as rheology modifiers, there is still a gap in many applications between the performance that these natural solutions offer, and consumer expectations.

At its core, biotechnology draws inspiration from nature. Sugars serve as the building blocks of many natural polymers, and plants can create diverse polysaccharides from these sugars. Of course, the majority of these biopolymers did not evolve for the benefit of the BPC industry, so one novel approach is to look to these ingenious materials for ideas on how to make better biopolymers that can be better performing for modern purposes. This can include varying the linkage, size and branching of the molecules for optimal performance and sustainability, including biodegradability.

For this approach to truly have an impact, it means developing biopolymers that not only match existing benchmarks but also have the potential to outperform them. It also means establishing a scalable process capable of influencing and replacing the volumes of synthetic polymers used today.

The path forward

The future of this industry belongs to those companies and innovators that use new platforms, natural or inspired by nature, not to avoid compromising performance, but to improve performance. Fortunately, innovations in natural materials are emerging to address this challenge, with performance and design flexibility even greater than incumbent synthetic materials.