Surpassing the "Ingredient Party", "one-on-one" customized skin care is becoming a new trend.
When "science" becomes the "foundation" of "skin care", what kind of sparks can be created between customized skin care products and consumers?
In today's skin care product market, it might be challenging to gain a foothold without some "hard technology" and "real skills".
After experiencing various "planting/weeding" situations, consumers are no longer satisfied with the simple whitening promotion or anti-wrinkle efficacy products on social media, and they even know which words are advertisements. When facing skin problems, they are more eager to know why they are like this and what methods can solve these problems accordingly.
For the domestic skin care industry, the change in consumer demands also means that they need to subvert the original cognitive system and re-search for solutions that can "represent the future".
At the recent Annual Meeting of the China Flavor, Fragrance and Cosmetic Industry, Bloomage Biotechnology released its independently developed "precision skin care" scientific and technological achievements, and announced that its brand, Runbaiyan, will start providing personalized customized skin care services in its Qingdao store in November. Runbaiyan will also become the first domestic brand to offer personalized customized skin care products.
Bloomage Biotechnology Chairman and CEO Zhao Yan and Yan Jiangying, Chairperson of the China Flavor, Fragrance and Cosmetic Industry Association, inaugurated the personalized customized skin care store workstation.
Personalization is not uncommon, but if you want to use it on your face, you still need to put in effort. According to 36Kr's on-site understanding, although it only takes consumers less than 20 minutes from the customization of the plan to the completion of product production, there are many "black technologies" behind it, such as AI skin measurement models, regenerative medicine, microfluidic technology, etc.
Bloomage Biotechnology Chairman and CEO Zhao Yan said: "Today's young group is more advocating for personalization, more confident, and believes in technology. Under the corresponding market demand, the development trend of the Chinese skin care industry is towards high technology, personalization, and specialization."
When "science" becomes the "foundation" of "skin care", what kind of sparks can be created between customized skin care products and consumers?
Customize essence liquid on a mini production platform based on "skin" measurement
At the end of 2022, the National Medical Products Administration issued the "Notice on Carrying out Pilot Work on Personalized Services for Cosmetics", officially opening the floodgates for the customization of cosmetics and skin care products.
First of all, it is necessary to clarify what the customized skin care "approved" by the National Medical Products Administration is. On the basis of product customization, it emphasizes that it is necessary to find the cellular pathways that cause different skin problems from the microscopic mechanism, such as telomere changes, insufficient mitochondrial activity, cell communication problems, etc., and then match specific raw materials that can regulate these pathways to make the corresponding products and provide precise skin care solutions.
The change in consumer demands is the direct reason for the arrival of the era of precise skin care.
"In the past few years, the rise of the 'ingredient party' has made some consumers equate ingredients with efficacy, thinking that as long as they buy products containing a certain proportion of ingredients, they will be effective after use. But recently, our statistics have found that nearly 60% of consumers prefer to understand their skin type first and then carry out effective skin care; on social media, the search volume for functional words and specific skin problems is much higher than that for brand words. Simply giving some ingredient names can no longer support consumers' requirements for the product itself." Fan Yuan, Vice President of Bloomage Biotechnology Business, introduced.
Thus, the concept of personalized customized skin care appears logical. And as a pioneer of domestic brands that launched related services, Runbaiyan's actual performance will also be the key to whether such products can open the domestic market.
From the process point of view, customizing skin care products is very simple. After consumers come to the offline store, they only need to complete a skin measurement questionnaire and then use the mobile phone camera to scan the skin. AI can analyze the skin from six dimensions such as facial spots, pores, and wrinkle texture, generate a skin care ingredient list suitable for themselves, and complete the production on the spot. The entire process in the store takes only about 6 minutes.
This process seems easy, but it is actually full of "technology style". The first is the AI skin measurement technology. Its data basis comes from tens of thousands of sets of clinical test data, hospital cooperation project data, and publicly available literature image data accumulated within Bloomage Biotechnology. On this basis, Bloomage Biotechnology has also designed its own deep learning model with independent intellectual property rights, which can continuously update and optimize functions as the amount of data increases.
At the same time, in order to achieve "spot delivery", Bloomage Biotechnology has specially developed a microfluidic production equipment that meets the needs of a small number of customized orders, which is equivalent to "concentrating a 3,000-square-meter standardized factory into a three-dimensional equipment the size of a double-door refrigerator".
This equipment can flexibly combine multiple small orders for production, and it can not only produce emulsions but also creams. What is more worthy of mention is that there is UV disinfection and a purifier in the inner cavity of this configuration, and the inner cavity meets the ISO 14644-1 cleanliness standard, which is a 10,000-level clean inner cavity. The ordinary cosmetics production workshop is 300,000-level, and its cleanliness level is 30 times that of the ordinary factory workshop.
Bloomage Biotechnology personalized customization store workstation
As for why this important "exploratory" attempt is entrusted to the Runbaiyan brand, Bloomage Biotechnology told 36Kr that the brand concept of Runbaiyan is "Repairing healthy and beautiful skin with biotechnology", and is committed to providing "efficacy solutions that address both the symptoms and the root causes"; and since its establishment in 2012, it has been deeply cultivating the medical beauty track and has accumulated a large number of consumers who pursue high quality and high efficacy.
It is an inevitable result for Runbaiyan to undertake the "heavy responsibility" of promoting personalized customized skin care.
It is reported that this fully automatic workstation equipment will be officially put into use in Runbaiyan Qingdao Mixc store in November. The concept of "personalized customized skin care" will no longer stay in policy documents, but is about to enter the lives of consumers.
So, how is this seemingly magical personalized customized skin care achieved?
Raw materials, qualifications, and quality system, the "technological power" behind customized skin care products
Behind the personalized customized skin care service, in essence, after the skin care product R & D technology has gone through the basic protection and repair supplement stages, it has the technical ability to precisely regulate human cells, and can "regulate at the cellular level".
This also means that the so-called "technological power" is no longer just like in the past, arranging and combining different raw materials and putting them all in the product formula, but from a deeper level such as cells and genes, clarifying the causes and effective targets of different skin problems, making skin care products like making medicine, and solving skin health problems in a more scientific way.
This solution can find professional logic in regenerative medicine, a biomedical technology that has emerged in recent years.
When it comes to regenerative medicine, the first thought of the outside world may be the scenes of "limb regeneration" and "rejuvenation" in science fiction movies. In fact, its more practical application is to use bioengineering methods to repair organs with damaged autologous functions. Projected to the medical beauty field, it is to maintain a healthy and young state of the skin by regulating the microenvironment in which cells survive or stimulating the body's own repair ability to achieve endogenous regeneration of the skin.
After all, "what comes from outside" is not as good as "what comes from oneself".
At present, around this "treatment" path, Bloomage Biotechnology has laid out six types of bioactive substances: functional sugars, proteins, polypeptides, amino acids, nucleotides, and natural active compounds.
The role played by the synthetic biological method is to present these "substances" that match consumer needs to consumers in the form of product raw materials: As a global cutting-edge biotechnology, it can "create everything with strains", avoiding problems such as many impurities, poor purity, and complex processes in the traditional chemical synthesis process, and producing raw materials with higher purity and better safety, and the efficiency is greatly improved, and the raw material cost is reduced. In the beauty market, ingredients such as hyaluronic acid, collagen, and ergothioneine, which were once very popular, have already benefited from the synthetic biological method.
Now, Bloomage Biotechnology has also applied this technology to the mass production of more active substances to serve as raw materials for personalized customized skin care products. Up to now, the company has filed 108 solutions for 15,625 skin needs; and has applied for patent protection for ingredients such as "Tough Yan Bo" and HA + ectoine that may be used in personalized customized skin care creams and essence liquids to form a raw material moat.
"We have adopted a modular formulation method, which can combine the formulation base with different active substances to maximize the extensibility and compatibility of the formulation without any antagonism or instability, and deal with special needs such as sensitive skin in a targeted manner." Liu Zhe, Dean of the Innovation Research Institute of Bloomage Biotechnology, explained.
Dr. Liu Zhe, Dean of the Innovation Research Institute of Bloomage Biotechnology, explains on-site.
He gave an example to introduce: "Itching is one of the typical symptoms of sensitive skin, but the causes of skin itching are complex, including problems caused by the histamine pathway and the non-histamine pathway, and different countermeasures need to be taken; the damage to the skin barrier also needs to be subdivided into causes, and for those caused by atopic dermatitis, the growth of Staphylococcus aureus needs to be inhibited. Therefore, according to the individual differences, manifestations and causes of consumers, a skin care product with a more targeted deep-seated cause is designed to help consumers restore a healthy skin state accurately and quickly."
Schematic diagram of Runbaiyan products.
However, customized skin care is a new thing after all. How to ensure the safety of consumers in the actual application process? In this regard, Bloomage Biotechnology has formulated a detailed quality supervision system. On the basis of ensuring that the product formula fully complies with industry regulations and strict quality control in the production process, a large number of partial tests and external evaluations have been carried out for the relevant formulas, including cytological tests, 3D skin tests and human tests, to ensure that the products are safe and reliable, and all formulas have completed the national filing.
With such a high-standard technology empowerment, the era of "high-end customized skin" may come soon.
Quality and service work together, Bloomage Biotechnology takes the lead in the new trend of customized skin care
Personalized customized skin care is undoubtedly the most attractive story in the increasingly competitive cosmetics market.
The first is the boost at the policy level. In the fast-moving consumer goods fields such as cosmetics, cultivating high-end domestic brands has been written into the "Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan". Having been deeply involved in the medical beauty and skin care market for more than 10 years, Runbaiyan has a deep understanding of the market and consumer perception: The current consumer market is highly competitive. To achieve a real breakthrough and find a "blue ocean", simply competing on price, concentration or formula is not a reasonable way, but to use scientific and technological means to meet the real needs of consumers and cultivate consumer mentality.
For the entire Bloomage Biotechnology, the core brand's trial of new businesses can not only enhance customer stickiness, but also provide imagination space for its skin care product segment to enter the high-end market and seek broader development.
This imagination space lies first in the many potential cooperation opportunities in the future. At the same time as Bloomage Biotechnology's new technology products were released, its performance in the capital market has also attracted attention. Recently, the old shareholder of Bloomage Biotechnology, China Life Chengda, due to its own capital needs, plans to reduce its holdings of no more than 12.042 million shares of the company within the next 4 months, accounting for no more than 2.5% of the total share capital. The previous holding period is close to 6 years, which is close to the final deadline of a general fund. It is worth noting that after the reduction, various business cooperation and exchanges between the two parties will no longer be related party transactions, and it is expected to promote more strategic synergy and cooperation.
On the other hand, this new personalized customized skin care business also helps Bloomage Biotechnology enter a broader emerging "blue ocean" track. Fan Yuan mentioned that in the skin care product industry in the era of precise skin care, the future will gradually show three characteristics: more scientific products, more precise definition of skin problems, and more personalized skin care solutions.
According to the "Custom Cosmetics Trend Insight Report", the global personalized beauty market is expected to exceed 500 billion yuan by 2028.
Overseas, personalized customized skin care products have actually formed a certain trend in recent years. For example, relatively mature personal care product brands have emerged in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States.
In China, related demands have begun to explode: According to a survey of more than 2,000 Chinese consumers by Mintel, 50 - 60% of the surveyed groups are more inclined to choose suitable skin care products according to their own health status, which will be more valuable; but in the terminal market, due to