Beauty brands are increasingly leaning into biotechnology to distinguish their products and positioning as consumers demand performance over puffery, but many beauty industry insiders caution that biotechnology alone isn’t enough to carry brands in a competitive market.
“Biotech cannot exist in a vacuum,” said Nini Zhang, managing director for beauty and wellness at Bank of America, during a panel discussion on beauty’s relationship with biotech at Beauty Independent’s conference Dealmaker Summit last month at New York City event venue Convene. “It needs to have a brand story around it. That creates differentiation. L’Oréal will never buy a brand if it just works in a vacuum by itself. It needs to be packaged in a way, have a narrative, have strong founders and live on.”
She emphasized that biotech-centered brands can’t skip forging an emotional connection with consumers. “I get the hardcore science, I can brush my teeth using fluoride and that’s very effective, but it’s something that I need to do, not something that I enjoy doing,” she said. “Yes, the effectiveness has to be there, but there also has to be that emotional connection. You have to go beyond that because there’s a lot of stuff that works out there. I really think it is that balance between oil and water because, when those mix together, you get a beautiful emulsion.”
Zhang was joined by Joshua Britton, founder and CEO of Debut, the biotech company behind skincare brand Deinde, Elana Drell-Syzfer, CEO of skincare brand RéVive, and Mary Fisher, CEO of cosmetics brand Colorescience, for the panel discussion in which they explored the upsides of brands diving into biotech and its future capabilities.
Biotech ingredient innovations are attractive because they allow brands access to molecules for formulas that might otherwise be difficult to put in formulas for a myriad of reasons, from sustainability to cost. More and more, Britton explained that companies are searching “the whole sequence” to find new ingredients that clinically outperform available ingredients.
“The last 10 years of biotech has been around creating the same ingredients but more sustainably, so if you look at squalene with Amyris, but the newest companies coming to the race now are asking what can biotech create that’s better?” he says, continuing, “We always say that the last 30 to 50 years in beauty has all been marketing innovation, but there’s been zero product innovation.”
In particular, Britton pointed out beauty brands are turning to biotech to help them identify defensible hero ingredients. K18’s bond repair peptide is an example of a biotech-derived hero ingredient that’s been key to brand success. Britton says, “When we look forward to biotech, we don’t think the era of the hero ingredient has even started in this field,” he says.
“You’ll see the downfall of biotech if everyone puts the prices incredibly high.”
Whether biotech is involved or not, clinical studies are becoming table stakes for beauty products. For a product with biotech-derived ingredient to tout efficacy, they’re certainly expected and can be expensive. Colorescience has commissioned clinical studies with around 200 subjects in order to demonstrate “reproducible results,” according to Fisher, and they can cost as much as $10,000 per subject.
To support their biotech endeavors, biotech companies have raises considerable amounts of funding. Arcaea, the biotech parent company of perfume brand Future Society, launched in 2021 with $78 million in series A funding. Debut has received more than $70 million in funding, and L’Oréal’s venture capital fund BOLD is its lead investor. Mother Science, a biotech-powered skincare brand that introduced its second product in May, has raised almost $10 million.
Britton suggested the prices of biotech-produced ingredients are due to decline as brand interest grows. “Technology has reached the point where actually biotech can be as a cost effective and scalable as a synthetic process,” he said, adding,“I think you’ll see the downfall of biotech if everyone puts the prices incredibly high and it remains there, because then it sets itself on a pedestal for someone to come in and destroy it. It’s up to brands to come to biotech players to partner with them and come in at much more accessible price points to drive its adoption in the industry.”
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