How Biotech Ingredients are Being Used in the Beauty Industry

When you hear about biotech, beauty and skin care products are likely the last thing that come to mind. Despite the fact it sounds like nothing to do with skincare, biotech is actually a really important part of the beauty industry. Not only are these ingredients making it possible to get better results with beauty products, they’re also more sustainable and cleaner than some traditional ingredients that they’ve come to replace.

While biotech ingredients have been around for years, they’re really starting to get noticed now. This is partially due to new techniques that are making biotech ingredients more feasible to use in a wider range of products. Certain ingredients have already been in use for a long time, including peptides, hyaluronic acid, squalene, fermented polysaccharides and many other ingredients. However, new ones are now coming out and they look to be ready to take over the skin care industry.

What Are Biotech Ingredients?

Biotech ingredients used in skincare products are often made from yeast, enzymes, and bacteria, or other microbes that can have their DNA engineered. Biotech refers to the process of taking these ingredients and engineering the DNA so the ingredient performs a certain way within a product.

The Benefits of Biotech in Beauty

There are many benefits to using biotechnology in your beauty products that benefit the environment, the economy, and your skin.

Cruelty-free made easy

No one wants a product that has been harvested from an animal liver. Without biotech, countless products wouldn’t be able to make the cruelty-free claim — like those containing squalene, which was originally taken from shark livers. Today, thanks to biotech, it can be reproduced from a plant source, like olives. Many other compounds are now reproduced by multiplying microbes and essentially creating a farm of self-sustaining ingredients.

More effective ingredients

We know that natural ingredients work well with the body in many cases, but sometimes those same ingredients can be made even more efficient and effective by changing them slightly. A great example of this is xylitylglucoside, which is a moisturizer developed from sugar. It’s excellent at stimulating proteins and enzymes in the skin, but it can only serve this purpose if it’s synthesized.

Another example is collagen, which was helpful to skin before, but is even more so now. Biotech-engineered collagen is actually created to make it through the skin barrier to it can create a plumper look and fill in wrinkles from the inside.

More sustainable products

For a long time now, one thing people have been clamoring for is more sustainable skincare and beauty products. It normally takes millions of rose petals to create enough rose oil to add scent to a product, but no longer. With biotech, it’s possible to ferment yeast to create the same scent and thus eliminate all those roses from being grown just to pluck the leaves.

Better for the environment

Not only are biotech ingredients better for you, they’re also great for the environment. Imagine how much land and water is necessary to grow the roses that were just mentioned. Instead of using up acres of land and thousands of gallons of water, it’s now possible to just reproduce all that in a lab.

Biotech ingredients don’t require nearly as much in the way of resources. This makes it more economical and efficient. The faster harvest rate also reduces the carbon footprint, making many of your favorite products more eco-friendly than ever.

Fewer contaminants

Anything grown in a field is likely to have some contamination in it. Heavy metals in the ground or in the rain can be absorbed by the plant and ends up mixed into your products. There are also pesticides on many of these plants and that can also end up in your beauty products through processing.

What Are the Potential Risks of Biotech in Beauty?

So, there are some definite perks to using biotech ingredients in skincare and other areas of beauty. The end results are almost always better and cheaper than the alternative, though just as high in quality.

Still, genetically modified anything tends to raise brows these days, so it’s not surprising that you’ll find people are a little skeptical about the whole idea of using them in their skincare products. Overall, cosmetics and skincare products that use biotechnology have a higher safety rating than those that do not use them. There’s a good reason for this.

According to this study, scientists have created and developed cosmetic formulas, along with formulators that can be carefully checked on actual human skin. The end result of all these tests means the ingredients are not only very safe once they reach the general public, but they’re also highly effective.

With biotech, there are also fewer contaminants, which means safer ingredients. Everything is tested before it goes to market, too. So, you can rest assured that you’re not likely to end up dealing with poor reactions to bio-engineered products any more than you would regular ones.

Examples of Biotech Beauty Products

Chances are, you already use products that have biotech in them. There are some notable brands, however, that have really taken things to the next level, such as IceAwake™ from Mibelle. This anti-aging skin cream has a base made from a bacterial extract, isolated from the ground beneath a glacier in Switzerland. It works as an anti-oxidant and energizes the skin, while preventing wrinkles and giving the user a special glow.

Geltor has created Elastapure, created to aid in skin elasticity as people age. The brand’s development of the very first completely plant-based elastin ingredient is making history. The brand uses fermentation to create their elastin when it’s traditionally derived from animals.

You may also be interested in Biophile’s microbiome products, which are developed to work with your skin. Biotech developed probiotics work to treat some common disorders and may even help reduce eczema and acne incidences.

Biotech ingredients are the wave of the future. They’ve been around for a while, but there has been a major jump toward incorporating them into more and more skincare and beauty products, so you can expect to see a lot more of them in the near future.