Is Customisable Skincare The Future of the Beauty Industry

Is Customisable Skincare The Future Of The Beauty Industry?

How often have you recommended a skincare product to a friend with the same skin type as yours, but not had her come back to you with the glowing reviews you expected? In fact, it is pretty likely that two people with similar skin types will have different experiences with the same product. This is because understanding your skin type is only the first step to finding the skincare routine and products that are ideal for you. There is a whole gamut of primary and secondary skin concerns to consider, coupled with your diet, fitness routine and even your sleep routine. While most beauty brands create products keeping generic skin types and concerns in mind, there’s a growing segment of those who can customise your skincare routine for you. Enter: bespoke beauty. In a world where everything from bags and shoes to bath towels can be personalised, why should your beauty routine be left behind?

When Customised, Less Really Is More

If you have problematic skin but aren’t a fan of an elaborate skincare routine, the healthy skin dream can seem like, well, a dream. This is where personalised skincare comes in. As an example, Clinique launched their service Clinique ID last year, which allows you to customise your own serum and moisturiser duo. The service has 15 different combinations that help to treat your skin’s primary concern—whether it’s dullness, unevenness, irritation or fine lines—while also providing it with moisture in your preferred texture. Neutrogena’s MaskID brings 3D printing to beauty by providing customised care to every part of your face, all in a single sheet mask. The printing technology allows every inch of the mask to be infused with a different blend, so it’s truly tailored to all your skin concerns — macro and micro.

When investing in personalised skincare, the odds are in your favour

Nothing says disappointment like a brand new skincare purchase that does nothing—or does all the wrong

things—to your skin. While experimentation is fun, especially for beauty aficionados, it comes with a price. This makes even more room for products that are tailored to your needs and lifestyle—they come with a higher guarantee of delivering on their promises.

Made-to-order Skincare Is Also Kinder To The Environment

It’s no secret that the beauty industry is one of the frontrunners when it comes to the negative impact on the environment. Among the many ways that the industry is a part of this, mass production of goods is the most prominent. Big beauty companies, especially those catering to everyday consumables, are rapidly creating products, and therefore plastic waste, every day. To put this into perspective, a study by UK-based Zero Waste Week showed that 120 billion units of packaging are produced every year by the global cosmetics industry, and most of it is not recyclable.

To counter this, Singapore-based Alcheme Skincare is taking the bespoke nature of the brand one step further by following a minimum-waste policy and relying on recyclable packaging. Since each product is made to order, it reduces wastage considerably, which is a major selling point for the brand.

The Boom Of Artificial Intelligence And The Bespoke Beauty World

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on its way to become a part of your everyday life—it is the technology behind your predictive texts on email, mobile banking and music recommendations across all your favourite apps. US-based brand Proven Skincare makes use of an AI algorithm in the beauty space to determine the best possible skincare formulas for you, keeping factors like your lifestyle, diet, skin type and even the air pollution around you in mind. In fact, according to them, all you need to get the best skin of your life is

a cleanser, a day moisturiser with SPF and a night cream. And they make use of more than 20 million dermatological data points and 4,000 scientific studies to give you the most effective skincare trio possible.

The Bespoke Beauty Names You Should Know

For serious beauty enthusiasts, currently, there is a small range of bespoke beauty labels creating everything from a single product to a whole routine that is customised for you. Dr Barbara Sturm’s cult favourite MC1 cream, which is loved by the likes of Kate Moss, infuses your own blood into the cream to promote skin regeneration. Brands like Skin Inc, Cultivate Apothecary, SkinCeuticals and Kiehl’s allow you to create your daily serum blends, and some even mix them right in front of you. Blend & Boost, another bespoke skincare label, combine its traditional apothecary roots with a unique skin coding system to create natural, customised formulas. Hop & Cotton, an Australian personalised skincare label, ditches the algorithms and has a two-way communication process. After you fill out your skin analysis and pick the products you’d like (cleanser, moisturiser, etc), they personally choose the ingredients that they believe would be ideal and run them by you before formulation. California-based Curology is out to make acne a thing of the past with a completely customised monthly routine.

Customers have always had to deal with products for which only addresses one or two of their concerns. This has lead to a culture of multi-step beauty routines with products that target each area one at a time, which can be inefficient, expensive and wasteful. While cult-favourite, single ingredient products will always have a place in our routines, a new tailormade all-in-one product might just be the way forward.

Les Nouvelles Esthetiques no’86