Biotech ushers in new class of personal care ingredients

Biotechnology is transforming ingredient development across personal care, enabling targeted, sustainable, and high-performance vegan solutions — all of which consumers are demanding. 

Innova Market Insights says that new product launches are combining biotechnology with high-efficacy formulations to address hydration, firmness, skin renewal, and healthy aging. These solutions are using ingredients ranging from biotech collagen and neuropeptides to microbiome-supporting actives and marine-derived ones. 

Annie Tsong, SVP of Corporate & Scientific Affairs at Amyris, tells Personal Care Insights that the cosmetics sector has led the charge in the adoption of biotech materials, and in return, the technology has transformed the industry. 

“In the last decade, we’ve seen biotechnology evolve from the provenance of early adopters to a place where several global brands are now relying on precision fermentation as the primary source for numerous keystone ingredients in their portfolios — including active ingredients, functional ingredients, and fragrances.”

Once limited by scale, fermentation and biotech manufacturing now rival established industries in consistency and quality, she highlights. Yet misconceptions persist around naturalness and premium positioning. As biotech evolves from a sourcing solution into a design tool, it promises new chemistries, textures, and purpose-built actives for brands worldwide. 

Biotechnology’s momentum 

Tsong names a combination of factors behind the momentum of biotechnology in personal care. She says that scale is no longer the major obstacle it once was. 

“Companies like Amyris and our peers now have decades of experience behind us to turn what was a novel technology into a manufacturing engine, and can guarantee consistency, quality, and scale, with the confidence of other well-established industries. This has been critical for global market adoption.”

She adds that consumer demand for renewable, high-performing ingredients will continue, and it’s outpacing what can be realistically supplied at consistent quality with traditional extraction and synthesis. “Fermentation is sometimes the only way to fulfill growing consumer demand.”

Tsong points to additional difficulties when considering climate disruptions, which are introducing “more volatility into botanical supply than ever before.”Biotechnology enables new chemistries and textures unavailable through conventional sourcing routes.

“Finally, cosmetics have always been driven by innovation. Consumers in this space are always among the first to adopt new technologies, whether it’s new production technology like fermentation, new formulation technologies like micro encapsulation, or new claims spaces.”

Denis Bendejacq, SVP of Research & Innovation at Kensing, also tells us that fermentation and biotechnology are transforming ingredient innovation. He predicts the continued emergence of an entirely new class of ingredients produced through these methods. 

“Biosurfactants are a good example. Beyond offering renewable sourcing, these technologies create opportunities to design ingredients with fundamentally different performance profiles and sustainability characteristics,” says Bendejacq.

Fabrice Lefevre, marketing and innovation director at Givaudan Active Beauty, previously told Personal Care Insights that biotechnology is completely changing the game. 

“Imagine harnessing the precision of science to recreate nature’s most powerful molecules sustainably. Fermentation technology, for instance, is delivering incredibly pure and consistent actives with a lower environmental footprint.”

Biotech battles misconceptions 

Fermentation-based beauty is centuries old, but modern industrial cosmetic biotechnology dates to roughly the 1980s. Innova Market Insights data indicates that the interest in biotech ingredients has been boosted by the popularity of fermentation and cell culture, which can help to improve solutions’ effectiveness. Peptides, plant stem cell extracts, and biofermented vitamins are all part of this trend. 

The current wave of precision fermentation, plant stem cells, exosomes, and RNA actives has accelerated sharply over the past decade. But with this harsh rise, follow misconceptions. 

Relative to traditionally harvested natural ingredients, biotech ingredients are often perceived as less natural. However, Tsong says that in reality, biotech-derived ingredients are frequently 100% natural origin from plant-derived inputs, and often carry “dramatically improved” sustainability credentials. An example of this is decreased land and water use relative to their botanically derived counterparts. 

“Not to mention their greater availability and consistency of quality,” says Tsong. Biotech-derived ingredients often reduce land and water use compared with botanical counterparts. 

Another misunderstanding is that biotech ingredients are niche, specialty ingredients that are suitable only for use in premium cosmetics. However, Tsong reveals that biotech ingredients (including Amyris ingredients) are used across categories and the spectrum from premium to mass sectors, including some of the most well-known supermarket brands globally.

Vegan interest sparks biotech demand 

Demand for vegan products is an important consumer driver for the adoption of biotechnology innovation. Innova Market Insights data indicates a 20% growth in ethical claims for personal care launches from 2021 to 2025. The company also flags a 31% average annual growth in vegan claims for cosmetic launches between April 2019 and March 2024. 

The market researcher reports that these rises reflect growing consumer demand for transparency, sustainability, and animal-friendly practices across the beauty industry.

“Ingredients like squalene, which have beautiful aesthetics and performance in formulation and are also a direct match for replacing animal-derived material, have a very compelling consumer-facing value proposition,” says Tsong. 

Alongside vegan demand, increased interest in traceability and demand for high performance are also important consumer factors. 

“Further up the value chain, production consistency and supply chain resilience are equally important drivers. We’re finding that biotechnology ingredients create ‘something for everyone’ along the value chain, which is a major reason they’ve been able to transform the market in a short period of time,” explains Tsong. 

Kensing’s Bendejacq adds that biotechnology enables the production of ingredients with high purity, consistent quality, and potentially lower environmental impact. 

According to Innova Market Insight’s 2026 trends, consumer curiosity is driving experimentation with advanced lab-grown ingredients and next-generation botanical actives, blending biotechnology with nature for more targeted, results-driven formulations.

What’s next in biotech?

Tsong says the most famous biotechnology ingredients in the market have been used to deliver more sustainable and consistent sources of materials traditionally derived from animal and botanical ingredients. 

“We’re seeing an exciting development where today, biotechnology is being used to access new chemistries and functionalities that would not be available through any other conventional route. In other words, biotechnology is becoming a design solution, in addition to a sourcing solution.”

She says this is true across the active ingredient space and functional ingredients, “where we’re now able to generate new textures and performance.”Vegan demand is a key driver behind the adoption of biotech beauty innovation. 

Tsong is excited to see an increase in proprietary active ingredients that have claims tailored to a given brand’s positioning and customer value proposition. 

“Along with that, I’ll be following the increased sophistication in delivery systems for those actives that are based on molecular-level understanding of skin biology,” she concludes. 

Meanwhile, Bendejacq predicts that biotechnology platforms will play an increasingly central role in ingredient innovation. 

“Rather than selecting from a finite toolbox of existing materials, formulators may increasingly have access to purpose-built ingredients designed to satisfy multiple technical and sustainability objectives simultaneously,” he says.