Artificial Intelligence – Delivering Transformational Innovation in the Beauty and Personal Care Industry

Artificial Intelligence – Delivering Transformational Innovation in the Beauty and Personal Care Industry.

The pivotal role of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the future of industry is the trending theme in scientific conferences, magazines, academic journals and other forms of knowledge exchange.  Indeed, in surveys, AI represents the prominent topic recognized by consumers, industry (1), regulators, innovators, industry executives and professionals.

The unique capability of AI is the generation of measurements and insights from complex information. The excitement around AI is in its ability to co-create with humans and extend beyond human intuition. In the cosmetic and personal care industries, AI will have an impact on every step of the formulation journey i.e. ingredients and their assessments, sourcing, formula optimization, testing [pre-clinical, toxicology & clinical], improving consumer aesthetics of products, identifying new product trends based on social media, new and unique clinical research, regulatory approvals to augment commercial operations including manufacturing and supply chain initiatives (1-4).  Additionally, AI has considerable impact on product design, packaging and recycling with influences on delivering climate along with ecologically aligned sustainable options for the future.  It is challenging to compile all areas that will benefit from AI. Highlighted below are some insights on a few of these areas.

Innovation in Product Development

Beauty formulas require extensive laboratory scale formulation efforts to research ingredients, design and experiment with prototype formulations to evaluate stability, safety and product efficacy (2).  These efforts require specialized laboratories, testing facilities, equipment to make formulations and appropriate infrastructure.  AI can identify ingredients most appropriate for products, offer predictions on product benefits and recommend recipes best aligned to generate stable formulations. These advances can reduce the time and effort needed for product development and research.  Additionally, these steps also save on raw materials and other costs such as energy needs during product development.

Advances in genomics, proteomics, microbiome analysis and affiliated areas of biological research progress to provide understanding of the mechanisms with areas such as longevity, aging and others central to the cosmetics and personal care benefit spaces.  These research areas will continue to progress and will be refined by improved molecular tools and analyses.  Each of these endeavors generate large amounts of data all of which align with the capabilities of AI.

Fragrances and perfumes are critical for product success. Leading fragrance and flavor houses utilize AI to develop functional fragrances with neuroscents and emotion aligned programs providing validated benefits in happiness, relaxation and focus. Similar to innovation in product development, AI is used to create perfumes based on digital fragrance models. This allows the analysis of thousands of fragrance formulae to determine trends and develop new perfumes aligned with customer needs.

Specific examples on the application of AI include:

1. Product benchmarking: An example in this space is Potion that applies AI to product benchmarking aiding R&D professionals, new formulation developments and facilitate market research.  The effort leverages a database of 70,000 raw materials and the tool can identify ingredients that can be presented for expert review (1).
2. Ingredients targeting the Microbiome: Microbiome based initiatives represent an important category for product innovation. These initiatives include prebiotics designed on the principles of biological alignment with human physiology.  Microbiome research and related Omics generates large amounts of data.  AI based algorithms and tools can analyze these data sets on microbiome communities, biochemical pathways and related areas to advance ingredient discovery, optimize formulations and clinical efficacy.  Some clinically tested examples include deodorant based on prebiotic to reduce underarm odor and a shampoo that reduces flakiness and redness.
3. Screening for new ingredients:
   1. An example capable of high-throughput screening for new antioxidants was reported recently (1). The AI was trained on constructed libraries of molecules to screen thousands of molecules and offer new approaches to identify unique molecules.
   2. Predicting the bioactivity of natural can accelerate discoveries of new ingredients. However, data is required to train AI models.  Limitations in adequate training data are identified limitations. In one example seen with FusionDTA, an AI model trains on synthetic compound data and fine tunes on smaller natural compound data to generate insights.
   3. AI-networks can be used to screen natural products for a variety of benefits such as skin inflammation, aging, hyperpigmentation and many others. AI network based biomarker discovery and analysis of proteomics data can predict synergistic effects of ingredients and identify novel mechanisms. These efforts can lead to unique patents and other approaches to sustain innovation in many science-backed and clinically proven beauty areas including microbiome, aging, scalp health and others.
4. Personized formulations: Customized skincare regimens align well with customer needs representing the future of the industry (3,4). For example, a recent launch describes an AI-powered skin care and nutrition advisor by Revive and Dr. Simon Ourian. The customer provides a selfie that analyzes facial skin for over 100 diagnostic markers such as pore visibility, hydration, fine lines and pigmentation and completes a questionnaire reporting on sleep, stress, diet and others. A digital consultation leads to product recommendations for topical skin care and supplements.

Biotech, Farming and Ingredient Sourcing

Giorgio Dell’Acqua provided a comprehensive and insightful analysis of AI to enable biotech-based farming in the April 2025 NYSCC Blog (5).  The blog explored production of metabolites and reducing the cycle-time associated with identifying, sourcing and production of active ingredients.  These advances are poised to reduce the current pressures on farming, environmental impacts to improve sustainability while delivering a robust and resilient supply chain for a secure future.

Personalization:

The shopper experience for customer loyalty is a recognized metric defining product success. Accordingly, investments and advances in beauty tech marketplace are replete with many initiatives delivering on personalized product initiatives (4). These advances include customized personal care offerings incorporating data captured by consumers remotely using phones, customized portable devices collecting vast amounts of data. AI Algorithms to predict, diagnose and track treatment efficacy, enable tailored and best-in-class products for dynamic personalized guidance to foster immersive-beauty immersive beauty globally.

The virtual try-on experience for consumers allows them to see the look of different products or product benefits over time. Consumers can upload a photo to a website for running simulations on product effects over time.

Final Remarks:

AI is recognized as an important global driver for broad transformational change in many industries.  In the cosmetic and personal care areas, emerging evidence identifies the impact of AI and related innovations with broad adoption in many regions (1,2).  AI-enabled outcomes augmenting diagnostics, microbiome insights, personalized formulations, insights from large data are some of the areas that are likely to re-shape global health, wellness and in personal care initiatives.

A broad consensus identifies and recognizes the development of multi-domain expertise to collaboratively engage the consumer, education, training and workforce development to facilitate AI-driven progress.  Several areas for consistent and thoughtful consideration include regulatory implications, data privacy (6), and careful implementation of collected AI-insights with human oversight identified as critical components.

Progressive implementation of AI centered initiatives will be clarified with emerging and validated information for efficient and wider deployment of these advances (7).  In anticipation of transformational changes driven by AI, significant investments, education, dedicated resources and infrastructure upgrades are reported as a national priority by countries and many large global and regional companies to secure their future growth and innovation.

References:

1. Eppler AR, Ma H. Artificial Intelligence Beauty Revolution—State of the Art and New Trends from the SCC78 Annual Meeting. Cosmetics 2025, 12(2) 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/cosmetics12020073
2. Xin H, Virk AS, Virk SS, et al. Applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning on critical materials used in cosmetics and personal care formulation design. Curr Opin Colloid Interface Sci. 2024;73:101847.
3. Hash MG, Forsyth A, Coleman BA, Li V, Vinagolu-Baur J, Frasier KM. Artificial Intelligence in the Evolution of Customized Skincare Regimens. 2025 Apr 18;17(4):e82510. doi: 10.7759/cureus.82510. eCollection 2025 Apr.
4. A smartphone application for personalized facial aesthetic monitoring. Hashimoto W, Kaneda S. Skin Res Technol. 2024;30:0. – PMC – PubMed
5. Dell’Acqua. Ingredient Sourcing and Sustainability: The Growth of Vertical Farming and Biotech. https://nyscc.org/blog/ingredient-sourcing-and-sustainability-the-growth-of-vertical-farming-and-biotech/
6. Data privacy in healthcare: in the era of artificial intelligence. Yadav N, Pandey S, Gupta A, Dudani P, Gupta S, Rangarajan K. Indian Dermatol Online J. 2023;14:788–792. – PMC – PubMed
7. How artificial intelligence adopts human biases: the case of cosmetic skincare industry. Georgievskaya A, Tlyachev T, Danko D, et al. AI and Ethics. 2023;2:212–214.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prem Sreenivasan, PhD, is an experienced clinical research professional with expertise in R&D, drug development and medical affairs developing strategic partnerships for innovation globally. He has led global product launches with unique clinical claims. He is a member of the NYSCC Scientific Committee and volunteers at several national scientific organizations in the health and wellness space.