There’s no single path to success when it comes to skin care formulating, as evidenced by the different—but similarly impactful—approaches of brands like Charlotte Palermino’s Dieux, Agatha Relota Luczo’s Furtuna Skin and Joshua Britton’s L’Oréal-backed biotech incubator, Debut.
The trio of founder-CEOs are united, however, in their respective missions to raise the bar when it comes to formula differentiation, potency and innovation.
“When we think about product, it always goes back to the claim,” said Britton in a panel moderated by WWD’s beauty market editor James Manso.
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The claim that propelled the development of Debut’s first brand, Deinde, which rolled out in January and features three stock keeping units, was to combat “inflammaging,” or chronic, low-level inflammation that accelerates the aging process.
“Three years ago, we looked at contract manufacturers and went to formulators and said, ‘we want to target this specific thing, and it needs to be clinically backed’—they said, ‘we don’t have an ingredient for that,'” said Britton, who in turn set out to create the brand’s hero ingredient naringenin, a grapefruit-derived polyphenol purported by the brand to be 15 times more effective than niacinamide at addressing signs of inflammation.
That is just the beginning, he said: “We’ve invested in machine learning and AI to figure out how we can create those perfect molecules to activate [certain] functions in the skin — some of these molecules are brand new; others are in such rare, trace amounts that we’re working on how to make them in mass formulations,” Britton said.
Dieux, which entered Sephora this spring, is increasingly leaning into biotech collaborators for product development, while also taking a holistic view at competitive differentiation. “The first thing we look at is, — is this a new category we’re creating? Or is it an existing category where we need to innovate,'” said Palermino, pointing to the brand’s reusable Forever Eye Mask as one such category-maker where “you try to get it in as many hands as possible, and then the marketing kind of does itself.”
In other cases, though, she looks at “how are we going to add something to the conversation—is it the price, the packaging, the formula; it’s almost easy to get someone to buy something once, but to get them to be a repeat customer and proselytize your brand is the more challenging piece.”
Furtuna Skin, which operates an 800-acre regenerative farm in Sicily, has cultivated a customer retention rate of roughly 83 percent for its olive oil-infused products through a focus on sustainable and potent formulations.
“Regenerative farming means you’re farming in harmony with nature; you’re preserving the quality of the soil, which in Sicily is full of minerals and volcanic ash which feed nutrients to the plants,” said Relota Luczo, who utilizes an extraction method inspired by the pharmaceutical industry’s ultrasound-assisted extraction technique to maximize potency.
Britton is also looking to the pharmaceutical industry to inform the next steps of Debut, though in a different way.
“I don’t think the era of the ‘hero ingredient’ in beauty has started yet; if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, everyone used to get their medication from tree bark, then chemistry became a thing, then biotech became a thing. So when we look forward to hero ingredients, we think of the next-generation ingredients that will open up claims based on new pathways within skin care.”
Supply chain, too, is an aspect in which Palermino is aiming to evolve her approach. “What we’re seeing with climate change is scary from an agricultural standpoint; there has to be nuance and it has to be more balanced,” she said. “When we’re looking to source our bulk raw material, we’re absolutely looking to things that are regenerative, but also reliable and ideally closer to nature, for example [suppliers] that are local—which is fantastic for local economies and can be done in a sustainable way.”
