HOW TO PREBIOTIC SKIN CARE
MAKE PREBIOTIC SKIN CARE
Gallinée’s founder on
formulating products that care for the microbiome
Dr Marie Drago, founder, Gallinée
Formulating for the skin microbiome is a real journey. Everything we learn about formulation goes out of the window. Suddenly bacteria are something to preserve, not to kill. Eternal shelf life is not such a good thing after all. Fewer ingredients is good and foam is bad. Let’s look into this more closely. When I started Gallinée it was with total innocence and a lot of weird ideas. I actually didn’t have much experience in formulation. During my pharmacy studies I was more interested in production. But, in the end, my studies were really helpful. Cosmetic chemists are trained, well… in chemistry. I like to say pharmacists are specialists in nothing but have an opinion on everything: chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry, physiology, genetics, quality control. And when developing Gallinée products I use all of this every day. Because the microbiome is so alive, we need to think past chemistry only. And from what I hear, more and more microbiologists are included in product development now. In the skin care industry, we are obsessed with active ingredients. But formulating for the microbiome is actually a lot more about the base of your product. All these unsexy functional ingredients that we never talk about suddenly take on a lot of importance: preservatives, perfumes, emollients and, most important of all, surfactants. They all need to be of as little impact on the skin microbiome as possible. The first step to care for your microbiome is to not strip it away! Only then can you start thinking about your active ingredients: prebiotics to feed your resident microbiome, postbiotics to stimulate it. Definitions are shifting a lot as the field is so new, so what we used to call probiotics (tyndalized bacteria, for example) are now postbiotics.
When we started five years ago, there were very few ingredients tested for their action on the microbiome; we had to go and look in the science literature a lot to choose the ones we wanted. Ingredient suppliers have now jumped on the trend and we see beautiful actives coming out, and functional ingredients, such as inulin, suddenly shine as prebiotic actives.
44 November 2021
How to...
Functional ingredients need to have as little impact on the skin microbiome as possible
We manufacture under GMP standards – prebiotic skin care, when formulated properly, is quite fragile. Of course you want to help bacteria on the skin, but you don’t want them to grow in the tube. We use some little tips and tricks to keep preservatives to a minimum, but sometimes we have to compromise on the shelf life. Challenge tests are not very adapted to microbiome skin care, and are always a bit of a stressful time for us. One thing I love about microbiome skin care: it keeps changing! After 15 years in the beauty industry I was finding it quite samey, a new star ingredient every year and that’s it. Microbiome skin care changes everything: the way you formulate, what you want from a product, what a beauty product even is. The science of it does giant leaps every year, and we have to adapt the way we formulate and communicate all the time. For example, one week after launching the brand, scientific consensus changed its mind on the ratio of bacteria in the human body. We had to change all our material from ‘You are 90% bacteria, care for them’ to ‘You are 50% bacteria, care for them’. Luckily, it’s still the tagline that we use today. That’s why I think it’s a proper revolution in
beauty, not just another trend. And the trend is contaminating (see what I did there?) all the other areas of beauty: hair care, oral care, you name it
cosmeticsbusiness.com
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