Personal care brand Unilever has restructured its science and regulatory teams—merging expertise under one group—to help foster more relevant and market-ready innovation.
In January of this year, Unilever unveiled its newly formed Safety, Environmental & Regulatory Science (SERS) capability group, formally merging teams from safety, environmental assurance, and regulatory affairs after 18 months of transition. Led by Julia Fentem MBE, Fellow of the British Toxicology Society and EVP for Safety, Environmental & Regulatory Science at Unilever, the goal of the group is to streamline in-house safety and environmental sciences with ever-changing external global regulatory requirements—a longstanding challenge for the entire beauty and personal care industry.
“We have these rapid, increasingly complex regulatory reforms, either in progress or planned, if you look ahead in many of our big markets,” Fentem tells BeautyMatter, referencing the EU, US, and China. And keeping up with these changes, she says, is highly complex for any brand.
In the EU, for example, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulation is being revised and the EU roadmap for animal-free chemical safety assessments is underway. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)—part of the European Green Deal—is also gradually being implemented. In the US, the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) is embedding more processes around transparency and evidence, all of which is being increasingly enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And in China, discussions are opening up on the adoption of non-animal safety science for the “Special Cosmetics” category—sunscreens, hair dyes, hair perms, anti-hair loss products and dark spot correcting products—that still requires animal data today under the country's Cosmetics Supervision and Administration Regulation (CSAR).
Closing the Regulatory Science Gap
Unilever's SERS capability group is designed to respond to the complexities of the global market, sitting centrally in the company's global R&D business and featuring around 180 technical specialists covering three fields: product safety, environmental assurance, and regulatory.
“Our remit,” Fentem explains, “is to ensure Unilever's products are safe, sustainable and compliant by design—and we do that upfront rather than downstream.”
The SERS group centers around “regulatory preparedness,” she says—anticipating and responding to upcoming or ongoing changes in global beauty and personal care regulations to “close that gap between where the science is, where our in-house approaches are, and the external world.”
And Fentem says, there is a very clear need to close this gap, given the “unprecedented scale and speed of regulatory change today,” but also because of how far scientific advances in beauty have come.
The flurry of new approach methodologies (NAMs) for safety and efficacy testing in beauty, for example, is surging, generating new data types and huge amounts of it, she says—much of which no longer matches “outdated” and “traditional” requirements of regulatory bodies.
There is a discord between cosmetics science and regulatory science, she explains, that needs to be smoothed out, and this requires “upskilling and knowledge transfer from both sides.”
Collaborative Industry Engagement
“The growing non-animal science community has got a lot of new methods,” Fentem says, “so the priority is to agree on how we best integrate the new types of data for decision-making and building confidence of all stakeholders in decisions that protect people and the environment from harm.”
Moving forward, she says more collaborative industry engagement to build out case studies that prove products and testing methods are safe and sustainable by design will be needed. “We need to make sure the ambition of the innovation is matched in how we can use the science on the safety and sustainability area. It's that investment in truly understanding exposure—using kinetic exposure models and getting investment in generating data—which will help us there.”
Some of this will be achieved in building out “pre-regulation industry frameworks,” she says, but these need to be based on consensus around the best science, the best data, and how to interpret that.
For Unilever and its new SERS group, the executive says initial focus will be on leveraging and further developing the company's existing core strengths around non-animal scientific assessments, next-generation environmental impact analysis, and computational modeling. Longer term, however, Fentem says the goal will be applying the team's technical expertise to new areas relevant to Unilever innovation plans and wider industry trends. Microbiome safety assessments, for example, will be a big area that needs industry focus in the near future, she says.
“My ambition is that we can play our part in making sure that we've got this shared understanding between scientists, irrespective of whether they are industry or regulatory scientists,” she says.
