Inflation is for egg prices, not active ingredients. And yet, we are witnessing huge inflation in active ingredient concentration in skincare. Take vitamin C, once used at 10 percent, now commonly formulated at 20 percent. Niacinamide, whose recommended use level is 2 to 5 percent, is increasingly used at 10 percent. Even the concentration of the mighty (and mighty aggressive) retinol is inflated. 1 percent is the upper limit for daily retinol, but it is now available at 2.5 percent for the face; no prescription required. Is this what product development has come to—brands attempting to outdo each other by ratcheting up their active ingredient concentrations?
The runaway inflation train must stop! When it comes to the concentration of active ingredients, more is not better. In fact, it is frequently worse. Using too much retinol, for example, can lead to skin irritation, disruption of the skin barrier, flaking, peeling, redness (“retinol burn”), sun sensitivity, and even vitamin A toxicity. Active ingredients have targeted concentration ranges for a necessary purpose: because that is what is safe and efficacious. You wouldn’t take 2000 mg of ibuprofen, so why do this to your skin?
Indeed, recent EU regulation has restricted the concentration of retinol for over-the-counter products to just 0.3 percent in face products, and 0.05 percent in body products. Kojic acid has also been reined in. Earlier this year, the EU restricted the use of this skin brightening and lightening ingredient to a maximum of 1 percent in face and hand products. While consumer interest in kojic acid has never been greater (global Google searches for the ingredient have increased by 400 percent over the past five years, according to the search analysis tool Exploding Topics), it has also been identified as a potential endocrine disruptor, with studies suggesting it interferes with thyroid function. And with the US facing increasing pressure to align its ingredient standards with international norms, especially those in the European Union, thousands of products are at risk of being banned.
Vitamin C, niacinamide, and the like may be proven skincare ingredients, but supercharging formulations with high concentrations does not qualify as innovation. So why are brands doing it? Consumers are increasingly demanding faster, more noticeable results, in part driven by unrealistic expectations as portrayed on social media. Meanwhile, ingredient concentration inflation serves as a substitute (albeit a poor one) for brand innovation. In this age of fast consumerism, commodity ingredients such as vitamin C and niacinamide are easy and quick to formulate; they are also cheap and recognized by consumers. Moreover, in the absence of true scientific innovation, brands are resorting to what they hope will be marketing differentiation: percentage inflation. “We can out-vitamin C our competition,” they appear to be saying, formulation stability and skin irritation be damned. Worse still, brands are promoting new ingredient concentrations and delivery systems as breakthrough innovation. With all these inflated ingredient concentrations, is it any wonder that consumer concern over the skin barrier has skyrocketed in recent years?
Tampering with the same palette of traditional ingredients won’t help brands make a dent in skincare innovation or address emerging consumer needs, even if formulation chemists find different ingredient ratios or ways of balancing formulations. Biotechnology, on the other hand, brings a world of novel ingredients to the beauty industry, including molecules that can’t be sourced or accessed in trace amounts from nature, and brand-new ingredients discovered only through AI. Biotech’s precision technology enables the creation of novel ingredients that are clinically effective in dramatically lower concentrations, delivering targeted performance to specific pathways in the skin, hyper-personalization, greatly reduced or zero skin sensitization (due to the lower concentrations and safety) and, of course, enhanced potency. Just as in the pharmaceutical industry, biotech uses ingredients at clinically validated levels and no more, which is crucial for product safety and quality.
Biotech formulations optimize the dosage of biotech ingredients by keeping the concentrations as low as possible to protect against skin reactivity. In the same way that the pharmaceutical industry determines the precise dosage needed for optimal treatment, biotech scientists understand where the perfect use level is, and they validate concentrations with data and proper clinical testing. In contrast to inflationary ingredient concentrations, biotech molecules are effective and safe at very low use levels (0.5 percent or lower). Case in point: biotechnology has taken on age-old kojic acid and hydroquinone with a novel, low-dose ingredient that inhibits melanogenesis (the biological process of melanin production) to treat hyperpigmentation, uneven skin tone, and brightening.
At a time when regulation is expected to clamp down on yet more legacy ingredients, and more people than ever identify as having sensitive skin, biotechnology is paving the way for a stable, noninflationary future.
