In-cosmetics Global 2025 live: Givaudan Active Beauty advances biotech for vegan skin care innovation
10 Apr 2025 | Givaudan Active Beauty
The demand for animal-free cosmetics continues to grow. At In-cosmetics Global 2025 in the Netherlands, Givaudan Active Beauty’s Mathias Fleury, head of category — Actives, explains how the beauty ingredient leader harnesses biotech to deliver vegan skin care solutions and reduce environmental footprints. Fleury also reflects on how consumer beauty trends will continue to evolve.
Personal coinsights Born in Cosmetics 2025 in Amsterdam.
We're here at the Shivaden Active beauty stand with Matthias Fleury, who is the head of Caterbury for actives.
Welcome to you.
So my first question, where is the demand for vegan skincare coming from in the personal care industry, and how is dividend catering to this?
We have seen, of course, these last years, the demand for vegan skincare growing up with, you know, of course, starting many years ago with the ban of animal testing, but of course it's moving forward with, let's say, preventing the use of any animal origin ingredients.
So for us at.
It's very important to leverage on our capabilities like biotech to provide vegan solutions, cruelty-free ingredients to the market.
So clearly that's something that we have deep in our hearts.
OK, and can you tell us how your solution silk eye care plays into this vegan trend?
So silk eye care is basically a biomimetic silk protein.
Which was, let's say originally obtained from animal origin like silk or spider, and of course like spider or silkworms, so of course our ambition was to provide something as iconic as silk to the market but with a vegan origin.
And of course we created this amazing biotech process where we can perform fermentation using some specific type of microorganism to obtain the exact same silk protein with amazing properties but without any animal origin.
And can you tell us more about why biotech ingredients are so important to cosmetics formulations and more about how you're formulated in this space.
So indeed what is really at the core of our expertise would be wild biotech, and what we do, for instance, is to work on strain engineering and synthetic biology to design new strains of microorganisms which can be used in what we call precision fermentation processes.
To reduce our environmental footprint, and I think it's something which is really important for our customers, for the beauty brands all over the world, to have sustainability very deep into their ambition.
And for instance, last year we introduced to the market an ingredient called primal 50 Life, which is a low molecular weightyaluronic acid with an environmental footprint which is reduced by a factor of 10.
OK, if we turn our attention to your product aluminum 388, how does this solution stand out from other skincare solutions targeting pigmentation?
So aluminum 388 is another good example of our capabilities in white biotech, this time in terms of biocatalysis.
So what we do is to take a very powerful natural antioxidant which is present in the green tea leaves, which is called EGCG.
We perform a glycosylation of the molecule thanks to enzymatic chemistry, green chemistry.
And we obtain an active which is acting on all the pigmentation pathways.
So not only is it anti-tyrosinase, but it also prevents the transfer of melanin from melanocytes to keratinocytes, and it is also a kind of prebiotic synergistic activity.
So it's a kind of holistic whitening ingredient.
It's brilliant.
And as a final question, in what interesting ways do you see the beauty industry evolving over the next 5 years?
I think we can see clearly the trend towards more sustainability, more naturality.
The big interest also for consumers to solutions providing personalization, customization, skincare for everyone, and it's not like any more demographics which have to be targeted by the brands, but it's really products which are unique to each and every customer, and I think we can offer very promising solutions to the market with our technologies to.
Create ingredients, taking care of each and every individual.
Thanks for your time, Mathias.
My pleasure.
