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Blue Cosmetics: How Beauty Can Scale the Riches of the Ocean

Published April 27, 2025
Published April 27, 2025
Luciann Photography via Pexels

New multistakeholder value chains must be established if beauty wants to bolster successful and large-scale advances in marine cosmetics—an exciting area for innovation, efficacy, and sustainability.The EU blue economy is vast, generating a turnover of $682 billion (€624 billion) in 2021, up 21% from 2020, with $83.4 billion (€76.4 billion) registered as gross profit, according to Eurostat data. And the sector, encompassing all economic activities based on or related to the ocean, seas, and coast employs more than 3.6 million people, according to the European Commission's EU Blue Economy 2024 report.For cosmetics, therefore, development opportunities were big, according to an EU-funded review published in iScience—particularly given how “underexplored” the marine environment was in beauty, despite the abundance of bioactive compounds and ingredients available.The review—backed by the European Union's B-Blue, 2B-Blue, and Community4Nature projects via the Interreg Euro-MED Programme—outlined how beauty could carve out its place within the wider blue economy, driving ingredient and product innovation and developing new and necessary value chainsWriting in the review, researchers spotlighted key areas of promise behind marine-derived actives for efficacious yet eco-consious product development across skincare, haircare, oral care, and cosmeceuticals for cleansing, moisturizing, antiaging, skin firming, anti-pollution, anti-acne, and sun protection.“Beauty products featuring marine ingredients, such as extracts from seaweeds and other marine organisms, have gained increased popularity and present lucrative business opportunities,” they wrote.

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