From Greener Swaps to Designing With Biology

Where do you see the most meaningful shifts happening today?

The most meaningful shift is biotechnology moving upstream, from a sourcing-and-manufacturing question to a discovery question. For years, biotech mostly answered “how do we make this known molecule more sustainably?” Increasingly it answers “which biological signals should an ingredient send in the first place?” Fermentation and postbiotic platforms are no longer just cleaner production routes; they are becoming tools to identify and produce actives whose value lies in how they interact with skin and hair biology. The interesting frontier is less about the footprint of an existing ingredient and more about reaching functions that were previously hard to access. Sustainability remains a baseline expectation here, not the differentiator it once was.

Beyond sustainability or ingredient replacement, how is biotechnology influencing how products perform or are experienced?

Biotechnology can enable new design strategies by tailoring material–substrate interactions. For example, because damaged hair becomes more polar following the loss of its hydrophobic 18-MEA layer, film-forming systems can be designed to preferentially interact with compromised regions of the fibre, the opposite affinity profile of a conventional silicone, which tends to deposit on virgin hair. One example of this approach is a fermentation-derived film-forming system based on pullulan, together with trehalose, arginine and lactic acid, developed for split-end repair. The point is not a “greener silicone” but a different mode of action: substrate-aware repair that withstands washing and mechanical stress. That kind of selectivity is difficult to engineer from petrochemical building blocks, and it is where biotechnology earns its place on performance grounds, not only sustainability ones.

What do you think is emerging as the next phase of biotechnology in personal care?

The first wave substituted materials; the next wave instructs biology. Rather than depositing something onto skin or hair, newer actives aim to reactivate the body’s own processes. For example, one active area of research is the development of postbiotic ingredients, such as Lactobacillus ferment lysates, designed to target the pathways involved in hair pigmentation: instead of dyeing fibres, they work upstream on the follicle’s pigmentary system, supporting melanogenesis, melanosome transfer and the melanocyte stem-cell niche while buffering oxidative stress. The ambition is restorative rather than cosmetic cover-up. This phase requires a stronger scientific basis, because the claim becomes biological rather than purely sensorial, and it blurs the historical line between “cosmetic” and “biologically active”, which is exactly what makes it both exciting and demanding.

Is the industry moving from using biotechnology toward designing with biology? What will this require?

Yes; and the clearest signal is how ingredients are now selected. From an industrial R&D perspective, the logic is increasingly reversed: rather than starting with a botanical and a hoped-for benefit, development can begin from a biological target, screening candidates against a panel of genes governing, say, pigmentation, melanosome transport and stem-cell survival, and then selecting the material with the desired modulation profile. That is designing with biology: starting from the mechanism and working back to the ingredient. It requires new collaborations and skills, with bioinformatics and data analysis sitting alongside biology and formulation, and marketers who can read a gene-expression table as fluently as a sensory panel. The cultural change is treating biological data as a design input, not merely as post-hoc substantiation.

What limitations, tensions or unresolved questions still need to be addressed?

Several. Consumer understanding of fermentation, postbiotics and “GMO-free yet biotech-derived” is still thin, and education has to precede enthusiasm. Regulatory frameworks lag behind novel categories, especially where an ingredient acts on biological pathways yet must remain a cosmetic. Fermentation also brings batch-to-batch consistency and scale-up challenges that formulators tend to underestimate. And there is an honest scientific tension: ex vivo gene modulation is promising, but translating it into visible, reproducible in vivo outcomes and substantiating claims responsibly is where most of the hard work lives. The field’s credibility depends on not presenting mechanism as if it were already proven benefit.

What might biotechnology enable that feels genuinely new?

The most novel direction is actives that read context and act conditionally, repairing only what is damaged, pigmenting only where pigment is lost, responding to a biomarker rather than to a dose. Combined with discovery platforms that mine biology for unexpected functions, this points toward personal care that behaves less like a coating and more like a biological collaborator: restorative, selective and quietly intelligent. Those are properties that are genuinely hard to reach by formulating with conventional, inert building blocks  and they are what make this moment feel like a beginning rather than an optimisation.