EP122. Lab-grown skincare: the new normal?

Would you ever consider buying Lab Grown Skincare? It sounds futuristic, doesn't it? And yet what happens when the human population peaks just under 10 billion people by the 2000s and our consumption rates have got so out of hand by that point that everyone has bathroom cupboards stuffed full of serums, cleansers and BB creams? Where are the ingredients going to come from for those formulations? Will we have enough land to grow them or will we need to trade off between the space required to grow food and to grow cosmetic ingredients? The truth is that these are big questions and they require big, highly innovative and possibly radical answers. Last week here on the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, I shared an interview with Barb Paldas of Codex Beauty Labs who is highly knowledgeable about all things biotechnology and uses many biotech ingredients in the formulation sold by her company around the world. Barb put to me that biotechnology has to be the future for beauty because it has a lower footprint all round and is more sustainable. But is the world ready to embrace Lab Grown Skincare? Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, Chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversation podcast and these are my Green Beauty opinions in which I share my takeaways from the podcast interview we released last week and set you a challenge to make the green beauty sector a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. As I was interviewing Barb last week, the main point that I kept returning to in my mind is whether the world is ready to trust biotech if they view it as creating synthetic ingredients despite the fact that they have originated from plant matter. If the response I see to Lab Grown food on social media is anything to go by, I can imagine that it may be a struggle to get some shoppers to willingly embrace lab grown plant cells for our beauty products. It is possible that without early intervention and informed discussion, this could even become the next battleground for the naturals movement. Now, I personally think it's unfair to view lab grown cosmetic ingredients in a negative light, particularly as so many naturally derived ingredients already originate from labs around the world where plant matter is chemically processed to create emulsifiers, surfactants, solubilizers, and particularly when it is possible to use biotech to create beauty formulations with extremely potent extracts derived from plants which may overall have a significantly lower environmental footprint. The possibilities are clearly huge and should be viewed as very exciting for all of us. But does that mean we'll move to a beauty industry where most botanicals are lab grown rather than harvested? Well, it's possible, but I suspect that there will always be some kind of hybrid. As Barb mentioned, we're unlikely to move to biotech versions of some of our Botanical foundation ingredients, such as plant oils, because growing them naturally is so much more cost effective at the moment, at least before the climate crisis has led to significant change in the way we grow crops. However, who knows where things might go in the future? For instance, NASA estimates that maize crops are likely to decrease by 24% by the end of the century, which will have profound implications for our food systems. Researchers for the scientific journal Nature published an article in 2019 that highlighted that plant species are going extinct at a rate much higher than expected. In other words, the climate and ecological crises we face may force us to rethink the way that we rely on plants for cosmetics. But I think it will be hard to change some of these ingrained behaviors. So while I was writing down my thoughts for this week's Green Beauty opinion, an email pinged in from one of my business friends who sent me a video of him and his wife in a high end spa in the Mediterranean where someone was blending together bath salts and dried herbs. And as I was watching his video, it occurred to me that this plant based ritual wouldn't be possible in the same way with lab grown ingredients. As I mentioned in my recent podcast opinion on our need to Celebrate and conserve botanicals episode 108 if you want to listen to it again, we've used plants as tokens of birth, death celebrations, harvest place, identity, luck, seasonality, games, even peace. Since the birth of civilization, we cling to plant rituals in our daily lives as they provide us with a sense of grounding or earthing as it's also referred to. So suddenly shifting to lab grown botanicals may be a struggle for some of the hardcore naturalistas amongst us. On the other hand, if these biotech ingredients display greater efficacy, as Barb told us they do based on the studies that she and her team have carried out, then I have no doubt that consumers will eventually embrace these ingredients and the formulations they come in with great enthusiasm. The key for all of us will be to keep in mind that sustainability has to be the overarching objective. If we can protect our plants for our own personal use, while creating beauty formulations that tap into their most efficacious chemical compounds, which are made at scale in an unpolluted environment, then biotechnology may well be our botanical future for skincare. So my challenge to you for this week is to keep an open mind when it comes to lab grown skincare based on plant cells. Read up about it, look into the research that ingredient suppliers are making available, try it out for yourself, and finally, consider what might happen to your favorite plants if we do continue with business as usual. As I said at the beginning, these are big questions that require big answers, so let's take part in that conversation together. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so in your favorite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host, and I'll be back soon with my next episode.