Could bespoke skincare be the next breakthrough for the beauty industry

Customized skin care products have long been in the beauty industry, but they have always appeared in a conceptual way and have not entered the commercial scale of mass production.

The wind of the AI artificial intelligence industry still blows into the beauty circle. The trend of using artificial intelligence to help detect the skin condition and then customizing skin care products for consumers has begun to rise.

On October 18, at the 2024 China Fragrance and Cosmetics Industry Annual Meeting and Industry Expo (2024CAME), Huaxi Biological held a precision skin care technology conference and launched a self-developed "personalized customized skin care service". The service will first land in the Qingdao Vientiane City store of the Run Baiyan brand of Huaxi Biology, and is expected to officially open for business in November.

According to Dr. Liu Zhe, president of Huaxi Biological Innovation Research Institute, there are three necessary conditions for personalized skin care, including "accurate skin detection, subdivided formula library, and delivery methods."

In view of these three areas, Huaxi Biology has carried out innovation: First, the company has developed an AI intelligent skin analysis system, and users can achieve accurate skin measurement through mobile phone small programs. Secondly, Huaxi Biology has established a precise formulation platform covering 108 customized solutions that can cope with 15,625 different skin conditions. In terms of delivery methods, Huaxi Bio-condensed a GMP workshop of 3,000 square meters into a personalized customized store workstation the size of a refrigerator, which can complete the production of a single product in 6 minutes.

In addition to personalized customized services, Huaxi Biological also unveiled two recently listed new products based on regenerative medicine "cell precision regulation" at the exhibition: Run Baiyan BloomCell nutrition solution and Quadi new generation CT50 cell energy solution.

Fan Yuan, vice president of Huaxi's biological business, said that the company began to lay out regenerative medicine in 2018, hoping to solve skin problems by going deep into the cell level to achieve more accurate and efficient skin care effects. Huaxi biology will soon debut in Qingdao Mixheng Run Baiyan store personalized customized skin care service instruments also brought to the scene. Consumers through the instrument customized a set of skin care products, in addition to the unified distribution of basic skin care water, there are two categories of cream and essence can be customized.

Interface fashion learned at the scene, the instrument has carried out a number of patent applications, the 108 customized solutions contained in the National Food and Drug Administration has also been filed, and completed the relevant safety and efficacy testing, the future of the company will expand more formulations, and the offline layout of more experience points.

Huaxi biology told the interface fashion, in addition to the customization of instruments in offline stores, Huaxi Biology broke through the technical bottleneck of small batch flexible production, and created a factory microfluidic production line and fully automatic workstation. At present, Huaxi Bio's microfluidic factory production line in Jinan can customize creams and essences at the same time, solve the production of different viscous materials through intelligent technology, and automatically match different homogeneous speed.

But at present Huaxi biological did not disclose the price of relevant customized products.

In fact, customized skin care products have long had signs in the beauty industry, but they have always appeared in a conceptual way and have not entered the commercial scale of mass production. Different from traditional cosmetics with standard products, customized cosmetics have higher requirements for production line efficiency and quality control due to small quantities and many SKUs, which also drives up costs.

However, in China's beauty industry is entering the current stock competition, more refined products and services are all enterprises are trying to find a breakthrough, and customized beauty although the investment cost requirements are higher, but if the success of commercialization, is bound to open up a new blue ocean for enterprises.

In addition to Huaxi Biology, there are many brands in the past two years to do customized beauty marketing.

For example, in mid-2023, L 'Oreal Group's skin care brand Sully released the Sully CUSTOM D.O.S.E Serum personalized skin care service in its Shanghai store, which can produce a customized bottle of personalized serum for consumers on-site within 10 minutes. It is worth mentioning that the Xiulike store has obtained the "on-site personalized service" cosmetics production license issued by the Shanghai Drug Regulatory Bureau, and is also the first licensed brand in the beauty industry.

In August 2023, Winona's parent company Bethany launched the acne treatment brand Beforteen. By combining artificial intelligence technology with acne diagnosis and treatment, Bevtin uses AI technology to grade acne conditions and form customized skin care solutions for different levels of acne.

There is also policy support behind the rise of bespoke beauty.

Officially implemented on August 1, 2022, the "Several Regulations on the Innovation and Development of the Cosmetics Industry in Shanghai Pudong New Area" encourages the innovation of the cosmetics sales model, on the basis of ensuring product quality and safety, encourages cosmetics enterprises to explore the production mode of small batch, multi-variety and high flexibility, and accurately develop cosmetics that meet the individual needs of consumers.

In November 2022, the Notice of the Comprehensive Department of the State Food and Drug Administration on carrying out the Pilot Work of Personalized Service for Cosmetics released on the official website of the State Food and Drug Administration clearly launched a one-year pilot work of personalized service for cosmetics in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong and Guangdong provinces. This further provides policy basis and direction guidance for the development of personalized customization of cosmetics.

However, judging from the market response of existing projects, customized beauty makeup is still in the stage of market education.