COSMETICS BUSINESS LIVE
why we need standards like MyMicrobiome. It’s very complex. Everybody has a unique microbiome and the interaction with the skin is not fully understood. There’s a lot to learn and when you want to make a claim, it is difficult to not have any issues with authorities.
And the third part is, how do you translate that to consumers? At the end of the day, they want an anti-ageing product – if it interplays with the microbiome, does that make a difference or not?
How do you share knowledge about microbiome-friendliness? Paldus: We’re very careful about what claims we make. We don’t want to overstep, so we don’t say anything more than ‘it’s microbiome-friendly, go check the certification out’. The challenge in formulating effective products is for the product to actually be effective and yet be microbiome- friendly. If you’re looking at actives like niacinamide or retinoids, those can be very harmful to the microbiome in high quantities and yet you need a certain quantity for effectiveness. So we’ve gone back to plant biology and we’re looking at plant-based equivalents, manufactured with biotechnology. But then we have to test them again! It’s a long and lengthy process, much of which can’t really be explained to the consumer. So we try to keep it simple and say ‘it’s microbiome-friendly’ and then we talk about the clinical functionality of the product, because we deal with a lot of skin conditions.
How about pro- pre- and postbiotics: how do you make sense of them? Neumann: So these are really trendy ingredients concerning the microbiome and they make the consumer think it is something that is important for the microbiome. But the majority are not scientifically validated. A lot of them are taken from what we know about the gut. And the gut environment is very different from what you see on the skin, so you cannot say it is having the same action on the skin. There’s a lot of potential for pro-, pre- and postbiotics, but brands will need a lot of good data to prove that. Coste: More than 95% of products that claim to contain probiotics do not contain probiotics. A probiotic is a live organism that confers a benefit and it has to be in sufficient quantities. Most
Understanding of the microbiome is growing, but brands should be careful of the claims they make
products that say they contain probiotics contain probiotic fractions, or what we call postbiotics. Or they contain probiotics, but they’re dead.
Can you explain the differences between pro- pre- and postbiotics? Coste: A prebiotic is food for your microbiome. It’s something that helps your microorganisms grow. The probiotic is the live organism. And the postbiotic is anything that’s derived from microorganisms. This could be a whole microorganism but dead – we sometimes call them ghost probiotics – it could be some fractions, some organelles, or just molecules that are produced by fermentation from this microorganism.
What claims can you make with regards to the microbiome? Neumann: So the claim that makes sense, that we can do at the moment, is to be microbiome- friendly, to not harm the microbiome, to not change it. Claiming to nourish, to rebalance, to improve the microbiome – there are companies that have done a lot of research and gotten a class action lawsuit. So, even if you have a lot of data, it is not enough to say it is improving something. That’s why you really have to stay down to earth.
How do you go about formulating microbiome-friendly? Paldus: First, you try to start with ingredients, for example, those that have already been certified microbiome-friendly. There are some that you can find on the MyMicrobiome website. But more importantly, less is more. If you’re formulating with more than 20 ingredients, chances are you’re putting your formulation at risk of not passing.
What is the key thing we need to know about the microbiome going forward? Coste: We are more microbiome than we are human. It’s hard to grasp, but you have way more cells from your microbiome than you do human cells and educating the consumer to get that mindset is going to take a while. Paldus: We’re only starting to scratch the surface now at really understanding the microbiome and that’s largely dependent on gene sequencing technologies, so as those techniques improve and become more cost-effective, we’ll be able to get more resolution. For companies making strong claims, unless you have an incredible amount of science behind you, that’s insanity. We barely know what the microbiome is, we barely know what the correlations are, we barely know how the species change with various skin conditions. So we’re at the beginning. But a very, very exciting beginning! Neumann: So just one last word from me. We know that the microbiome is important. And I think everyone in cosmetic science and the cosmetics field should be aware of it when creating new formulas. And I think our goal is that all cosmetics on the market will be microbiome- friendly one day
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