Debut manufacturer will bring biotech formulations to skin care boutique

Beauty biotech company Debut has announced a collaboration between its contract manufacturing business, BiotechXBeautyLabs, and Formula Fig, a high-end skin care boutique in Canada and California, US. BiotechXBeautyLabs will create a skin care line for Formula Fig, which offers facials and injectable treatments, allowing clients to extend their beauty treatment results at home.

Debut develops and produces bioactive cosmetic ingredients, specializing in biomanufacturing scarce ingredients that otherwise require significant resources to process through traditional methods.

BiotechXBeautyLabs will provide clinically-backed skin care formulations to support Formula Fig’s beauty services. 

Personal Care Insights speaks to Joshua Britton, Debut founder and CEO, about entering the professional beauty services market and how the company is situated to support product development and large-scale ingredient production.

What products will BiotechXBeautyLabs provide to Formula Fig? 

Britton: We will be creating a skin care line, including serums and other potent products, that complements Formula Fig’s tech-enhanced, minimally invasive treatments, enabling its clients to extend the results of the treatment room. Our advances in skin biology and understanding of key areas — such as aging and longevity — mean we can apply a scientific approach to creating solutions that have true credibility and align well with professional beauty services. 

Our partnership with Formula Fig underscores biotech’s unparalleled ability to deliver peak performance, clinical validation and superior claims. The collaboration combines beauty with medical aesthetics at a time when the medicalization of beauty is fast becoming the next big thing. 

Why is it important that BiotechXBeautyLab products are clinically backed?

Britton: Entering the professional beauty services market was the next logical step for us as biotech beauty is underpinned by potency, purity, performance and safety. We help med spas, skin care studios and facial bars reinforce the links between wished-for claims and pure clinical results, thanks to our proprietary collection of biotech ingredients. 

As consumers increasingly prioritize clinically backed beauty, biotech delivers novel claims that help differentiate professional services in a crowded market. Skin care destinations such as Formula Fig are early adopters in post-treatment biotech skin care.

It is also important to note that we have invested heavily in comprehensive safety tests to ensure our products are safe and used at clinically effective levels to avoid any skin sensitization. Biotech ingredients are designed to have high-precision specificity to a claim and are so potent they are typically used at concentrations lower than 0.5%.

You have highlighted a mission to transition the beauty industry away from petroleum. What is Debut doing to meet this mission?

Britton: Debut is catalyzing an era of product differentiation. We are pioneering the industry’s transition from unsustainable cultivation and petroleum-derived ingredients to biotech through the discovery and commercialization of higher-performing ingredients and products. 

At Debut, our biomanufacturing processes save up to 90% water while securing supply chains. Our powerhouse polyphenol, Naringenin, is found in citrus peels and is climate-intensive to extract. To produce 1 kilogram of Naringenin requires 3,356 grapefruits, 0.37 acres and 38,575 liters of water. Biotechnology makes the potency of this polyphenol available to consumers without wasting land or water. 

Debut also creates novel ingredients that unlock a new era in product performance and novel claims. With changing regulatory pressures on traditional ingredients such as retinol and kojic acid, we must innovate better-performing ingredients that spare brands from losing market share by having to remove products from the market (or reformulate them). At BiotechXBeautyLabs, we are investing heavily in creating two new ingredients per year to drive forward product innovation. We anticipate being able to go from consumer insights to formulated and clinically verified ingredients in 18 months. 

We believe biotech will become table stakes in the beauty industry. Through BiotechXBeautyLabs, we are catalyzing this transition as 99.9% of beauty brands cannot invest over US$100 million into R&D. It is our mission to make that happen by creating the products and tools that give all beauty brands access to biotech.

Are there any other criteria that you use to help select a product besides clinical research? What additional priorities should your products meet?

Britton: Biotech brings together innovation, performance, safety and sustainability. Our proprietary biotech platform delivers all the myriad benefits of nature by replicating the molecular structure of rare and never-before commercialized naturals, innovating entirely novel molecules without compromising on product performance and, in many cases, significantly improving it. As a vertically integrated company, our biomanufacturing processes also ensure large-scale production in a safe, controlled environment. The world of beauty and pharmaceuticals will continue to merge as we innovate the next generation of peak-performing ingredients. 

Debut developments

Additionally, Debut has made some surprising collaboration news this year. This summer, the US Department of Defense awarded Debut with a first-of-its-kind contract to build a biofactory, part of a new initiative to support domestic bioindustrial supply chains in the country. The initial US$2 million contract is for designing the facility and an additional award will go toward building. This highlights the government’s focus on reducing reliance on foreign sources for ingredients that go beyond the beauty industry, but are also used in the manufacture of other materials.

Personal Care Insights previously spoke to Britton about how more companies are looking past marketing to focus on scientific biotech solutions that cater to growing consumer demand.