OCTOBER 2019 • Vol. 25 No. 8
New York Society of Cosmetic Chemists
www.nyscc.org
Natural Ingredients—Science and Efficacy
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…by Giorgio Dell’Acqua
osmetics based on natural ingredients have boomed in the personal care market parallel to a consumer demand for purity, safety, and efficacy. Although technology-based products and natural products have been historically growing as separate categories, nowadays it is possible to merge them by developing natural ingredient into innovative products with proven efficacy, while maintaining their positive image of purity, eco-friendliness, and sustainability.
Natural Products and Testing The use of natural products has risen in recent years since they are associated with health and well being. In fact, products derived from biological agricultural sources have experienced tremendous growth in the food and nutraceuticals marketplace as consumers eagerly seek plants with health benefits. Plant extracts from maca root, turmeric root, camu camu fruit, ashwagandha fruit, baobab fruit, and many other exotic plants are finding their way as supplements into the superfood category, since they contain high levels of vitamins, minerals, or other active molecules. These extracts are often marketed as energy boosters but also have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and adaptogenic properties due to their high ORAC values and their history of use in traditional medicine. In the late 1990s, natural extracts drove marketing claims based on the properties of their plant origins, often linked to the plant’s antioxidant profile or wound-healing capacity, but with little tested or proven efficacy.1 These claims were mostly anecdotal and derived
from ethnobotanical literature, but often difficult to validate. The lack of welldesigned scientific studies on skin for these extracts limited the understanding of their real scientific value. Furthermore, research was often confined to universities or research centers with little experience in technology transfer, requiring excessive time and costs to deliver results, and lacking standardized protocols to research skin applications. This setting limited the ability to evaluate, qualitatively and quantitatively, the in vitro and clinical efficacy of natural extracts. Also, most data were published in local scientific journals difficult to access, not always peer-reviewed and with a low impact factor. In the early 2000s, things began to change when technology and science became available for both developing the extracts and testing them.2,3 Initially, technologies such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics (also called the omics) were mostly confined to universities, the pharmaceutical industry, and the imaging industry (including devices to quantify skin surface profiles and wrinkles, or measure skin color intensity).4 Eventually, access to these technologies changed and they became more readily available and at a reasonable cost at specific CROs, making them accessible to the cosmetic scientist. Today, it is possible to obtain reproducible scientific data on natural ingredients to create naturally derived products with proven efficacy. However, it is often necessary to transform a natural raw material into a natural active ingredient to be able to fully study its efficacy. (Continued on page 4)
F O R M U L A T I N G W I T H N A T U R A L I N G R E D I E N T S October 16th • Venetian, Garfield, NJ