Eco-conscious beauty moves upstream as biotech and fermentation drive green formulation

Consumers are demanding products that promise sustainable beauty, causing “eco-consciousness” to become a prerequisite in the industry. The term has evolved from end-of-life demands, such as recyclable packaging, to a more holistic approach for ensuring environmental ethics.

Eco-conscious thinking is increasingly embedded across the supply chain and manufacturing capabilities in the beauty sector as it works to meet market demands. For industry players, this means environmentally mindful ingredient selections, resource-efficient manufacturing processes, and low-impact packaging choices.

Innova Market Insights data shows a 15% CAGR for products with ethical and sustainable claims from July 2021 to June 2026. While hair care represented the largest volume of launches in the segment, fragrance demonstrated the most innovation, where eco-conscious claims had the fastest growth.

Personal Care Insights speaks to Univar, Algiecel, Abolis Biotechnologies, and Melt&Marble to discuss how eco-consciousness must permeate a company’s operations to be comprehensive. The industry representatives tell us about how consumer awareness is reshaping the industry’s approach to sustainability and how to avoid disingenuous marketing claims, or “greenwashing.”

The spokespeople share their perspectives on what kind of trade-offs can be expected with the shift toward sustainability, and what technologies are emerging as key players in the pursuit of meeting eco-friendly demands — for consumers and the planet.

Holistically eco-conscious

Eco-conscious beauty is reshaping ingredient sourcing and product development.

Consumers are becoming more aware of both personal wellness and the environmental implications of the products they use, Claudia Barba, technical services manager, Beauty & Personal Care, at Ingredients + Specialties from Univar Solutions, tells us.

She says clean beauty is increasingly associated with factors such as sustainability, product safety, ethical business practices, and “free-from” formulations, which present a tougher rubric to meet consumer demands.

“In response, formulators are incorporating renewable, biodegradable, and naturally derived ingredients while maintaining efficacy, stability, and desirable sensory properties,” Barba says.

Laura Hulkko-Moniz, cosmetics product manager at Algiecel, and Gwenaël Servant, VP of business and strategy at Abolis Biotechnologies, voice that sustainability is increasingly moving upstream in product development.

Servant says that the more multidimensional approach to eco-friendliness does not replace the fundamentals. “The change is that environmental performance increasingly needs to be considered alongside them from the outset, rather than assessed once an ingredient or product has already been developed,” he says.

Melt&Marble’s chief business officer, Thomas Cresswell, tells us that the increasingly holistic understanding of eco-consciousness is also fostering accountability and traceability in the industry. “Brands are increasingly expected to explain where ingredients come from, how they are produced, and how they achieve environmental responsibility in their supply chains,” he says.

“Brands are paying closer attention to traceability, land use, deforestation risk, and dependence on climate-sensitive crops, particularly for ingredients such as oils, fats, and lipids that are typically sourced from tropical regions.”

Cresswell says that the more comprehensive understanding of sustainability also drives greater interest in multifunctional ingredients that combine performance, sensory benefits, and sustainability, while enabling simpler formulations and shorter ingredient lists.

Compromises in sustainability

Sustainable formulations must still deliver on efficacy, safety, and sensory appeal.

The primary conundrum in eco-conscious innovation is balancing sustainability with scalability, efficacy, safety, and consumer satisfaction. Barba tells us that consumers increasingly expect brands to demonstrate sustainability commitments, but are unwilling to compromise on product efficacy, aesthetics, convenience, or price.

Brands are moving to remain commercially competitive while facing added cost through sustainability validation and certifications, says Algiecel’s Hulkko-Moniz. “This highlights the need to produce validated sustainable ingredients that also match, or even exceed, the performance of existing alternatives at an affordable price.”

Additionally to the administrative costs of sustainability, Cresswell says that the technologies that allow for eco-conscious development can also present a price barrier. “Bio-based and biotechnology-derived ingredients may offer advantages in traceability and supply-chain resilience, but can initially carry a premium while production scales,” he states.

Servant adds that the greatest trade-offs of balancing sustainability, scalability, and efficacy often appear when improving one part of the system creates pressure somewhere else. He emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to innovation, which considers the formulation from multiple perspectives.

“A change intended to reduce the impact of a raw material, for example, may introduce additional processing requirements, affect formulation behavior, or increase manufacturing cost. Looking at individual environmental indicators in isolation can therefore give an incomplete picture.”

Approaching eco-consciousness as a larger whole rather than the sum of the product’s parts allows sustainability that holds up throughout the supply chain. “This means closer collaboration between suppliers, formulators, and manufacturers early in the process, so that potential new ingredients are assessed against the full set of requirements — technical feasibility, economic viability, performance, and sustainability improvement compared with the existing alternative,” says Servant.

Stronger substantiation is helping the industry tackle greenwashing concerns.

Avoiding greenwashing through substantiation

Parallel to the growing demand and pressing environmental necessity for ecologically minded beauty is the growing awareness around disingenuous claims and greenwashing. Consumers are progressively able to spot an unfounded claim or disentangle marketing from its adjunct sustainability buzzwords.

In addition to the court of public opinion, lawmakers are refining regulations on a policy scale to encourage planet-friendly solutions. For example, an incoming EU directive mandates that companies making environmental claims will need to make those claims specific and be able to substantiate them with measurable objectives and verifiable evidence.

All four spokespeople echo the sentiment that precision, transparency, traceability, and scientific rigor are crucial to reliably making sustainability claims. “Generic and vague sustainability claims without appropriate substantiation are becoming both a reputational and regulatory risk,” says Hulkko-Moniz.

Servant makes a case against cherry-picking in claims: “The scope of the claim should match the scope of the evidence — demonstrating lower water use, energy demand, or waste at one stage of production does not automatically establish that the whole product has a lower environmental impact.”

The spokespeople also converge in stating that greater standardization in the industry across methodologies of assessments and regulatory compliance is helpful in aligning expectations and the delivery of clearly defined sustainability claims.

Sparing nature through tech

Biotechnology is opening new pathways for more sustainable cosmetic ingredients.

Biomanufacturing and biotechnology are taking center stage in providing ecologically minded solutions in personal care. The spokespeople tell us how they project these technologies, refined data tools, and industry collaboration will shape eco-consciousness in beauty over the next five years.

“Biotechnology will have one of the greatest impacts on reducing the cosmetic industry’s environmental footprint as it allows the industry to produce high-performance ingredients with less dependence on land-intensive crops, animal inputs, and long, vulnerable supply chains,” Cresswell tells us.

Hulkko-Moniz adds that controlled cultivation platforms, such as phototrophic microalgae cultivation, can manufacture efficacious ingredients with consistent quality while reducing reliance on climate-sensitive agriculture, marine extraction, and volatile supply chains.

Fermentation is also yielding much attention from the industry. “In some cases, fermentation may provide the only viable production route for a particular ingredient; in others, it can offer lower production costs, higher yields, or improved functional performance compared with existing production methods,” says Servant.

“It can also provide alternative production routes for ingredients traditionally derived from animals or extracted from plant sources that may be difficult to source sustainably, while giving manufacturers greater control over how and where those ingredients are produced.”

Melt&Marble also expects to see greater use of multifunctional ingredients that simplify formulations by replacing several ingredients with one. “This can reduce resource use, improve traceability, and potentially reduce the number of materials formulators need to source while delivering multiple functional or sensory benefits,” Cresswell says.

Servant and Barba add that, in addition to manufacturing, data-driven tools will become increasingly important to sustainability.

“Some of the biggest gains may come from technologies that help companies make better development decisions earlier, rather than from any single new ingredient or material,” concludes Servant.