EP190. Industrial vs artisan beauty

I've welcomed several biotechnologists onto the podcast over the last year or so and we've unpicked what biotech could mean in beauty and how it ties in with the sustainability conversation. And it's clear that the big corporate cosmetic companies are actively thinking about biotech or synthetic biology, whether ingredients are grown from natural sources at scale in a lab. And last week here on the podcast I interviewed Joshua Britton of Debut Biotech who talked to me at length about his plans for completely changing the way we use plant based ingredients in cosmetics by synthesizing them in a lab. But what I find really fascinating in all of this is that I'm just not feeling any interest for this topic from the indie beauty sector. My team and I are just not seeing our community talk about biotechnology. And just to make double sure, we ran a search in the tens of thousands of posts in our main online classroom and we found a grand total of five posts from our students, all of which were questions about whether anyone actually thought this was even going to take off. You know, Formula Botanica is the world's leading formulation school. Virtually everyone who enrolls with us intends to become a formulator and sell their products. So you would think that if tides were turning towards biotechnology in the independent or indie sector that we would have seen something. The big players need biotech. That much I am absolutely crystal clear on. They represent industrial scale beauty. But will there perhaps eventually be a split between industrial and artisan where industrial corporates make their ingredients fully in a lab and artisan formulators rely on natural ingredients at a much smaller scale so that they have a differentiator to set themselves apart. Join me in today's episode as I try to think 10 or maybe 20 years into the future to picture how beauty might be sourcing ingredients from nature at that point. Hi, it's Lorraine Darmaier, chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations 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 now. I like this idea of splitting the big corporates versus the indie beauty brands into the either industrial or artisan sectors. This concept of artisan beauty fits so well with the independent or indie brands where formulators are working in tiny rooms with small batches of natural Botanical ingredients that they're using to produce fresh plant based formulations to send directly to their customers. On the flip side, industrial beauty means producing cosmetics at a humongous industrial scale. Many hundreds of millions of units per year, if not billions. I saw a photo the other day of l' Oreal's largest makeup production facility in Asia Pacific in Yichang in China. It was enormous. It looked so futuristic. Go look it up online, find yourself a photo so you can see what I mean. It looks like it's the equivalent of multiple aircraft hangars in size. Now that is industrial beauty. So it makes sense that industrial beauty is wholeheartedly going to embrace biotechnology. They use so much land and so many ingredients and they have absolutely zero plans of scaling back or embracing de growth. In fact, I would imagine that they just want to go bigger all the time. So I think they'll continue to have this insatiable appetite for ingredients, for packaging, and yes, for their sales. When it comes to biotech beauty, I also see parallels with the meat industry, where so many startups are trying to corner the lab grown meat market, and it's not there yet in terms of flavor or texture or cost. But I can see that their vision could be able to grow affordable meat at scale in a lab, and then perhaps leave the artisans to rely on organically reared animals under far more sustainable conditions. Perhaps I'm being a bit utopian in this, but I wonder if this could be a similar split that we eventually see between industrial and artisan beauty. Of course, the fascinating point in all of this is that up until about 10 years ago, this synthetic versus natural split was in fact the norm in the beauty industry. The big players predominantly relied, and let's be fair, they still do rely on synthetic chemicals made in a lab for their formulations. Now, just as a quick disclaimer and reminder here, Formula Botanica does not vilify synthetic chemicals, nor are we scared of them. We believe, however, that some of them have no place in beauty, particularly plastics. But we don't take part in the fear mongering that you see all over the Internet. The fact remains, however, that the big industrial beauty players obviously need to rely on ingredients made at scale, and synthetic is more logical here. However, this is also how the indie beauty sector emerged. By vilifying those synthetic ingredients and by then incorporating naturals into their formulations. The natural versus synthetic debate took off and the indie beauty sector was born. I explored this in far more detail back in episode 63, which is one of my favorite ever podcast episodes, when I looked at the way that parabens kickstarted the indie beauty sector. Go back and have a listen to it if you haven't heard it yet. And then to counter the heavy criticism coming their way for not using naturals, the industrial beauty sector then worked really hard over the last decade to incorporate those natural plant based ingredients into their formulations. Ten years ago, the trade shows for cosmetics didn't talk about naturals. I used to go to these shows and have people laugh in my face when I asked about plant based ingredients, and now it's all you see. So this shift back to synthetically created naturals is an interesting development and is probably exactly what the industrial beauty sector needs. I do wonder how they're going to navigate this from a PR perspective. And I suspect that the next big sort of marketing and reputation PR clash will be around the claimed efficacy of synthetic naturals versus actual naturals, where I expect the industrial beauty sector will start to push the message harder that their formulations work better and are more efficacious. So is the indie or artisan sector ready for biotechnology yet? Well, based on everything I've seen so far, I would say probably not. They might be in the future, but only time will tell. And I do suspect that some artisans will go the other way and really fully embrace those plant based botanical ingredients. So my challenge to you for this week is to just keep on soaking up the information about biotechnology and beauty. I'm doing this too. I'm watching, I'm learning, I'm trying to understand what the impacts are. There is clearly an enormous shift about to occur for big industrial beauty and I will be watching with great interest. I suggest you do the same. 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 in the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so now 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.