Cosmetics & Personal Care | Monthly bulletin | January 2022
Intimate beauty, the new self-care
Intimate beauty was previously a hush subject due to social embarrassment, leading to a lack of understanding of the specific needs and characteristics (e.g. microbiota) of intimate parts of the body.
With the increased focus on self-care and wellbeing that many consumers have today, brands are breaking down barriers and disrupting outdated taboos by designing new products as part of everyday self-care and beauty routines.
The biggest challenge for brands is developing specific products by creating a multi-step routine around intimate hygiene, care and beauty to encourage consumers to take care of themselves and boost their confidence.
Eurofins Cosmetics & Personal Care is your partner for testing specially formulated solutions, connecting skin benefits with safety and efficacy (in vitro tolerance tests, clinical scoring, instrumental assessment, questionnaires, etc.).
Home User Trials: connect brands to consumers
Home User Trials (HUTs) provide a rapid insight into the consumer perception of your product across a large panel in a real-world setting.
Offered by Eurofins, HUTs allow the most natural use of a product, and therefore the evaluation of a product in a real-life context: validate purposes before launching the product, understand product performance, examine consumer habits, understand long-term effects of product usage and the acceptance of the overall usage, etc.
Eurofins has a diverse and global database of many thousands of subjects worldwide to support clients in the various steps of developing and launching a product, including but not limited to: go / no-go decisions, absolute strengths and weaknesses, needs for product development, claim substantiation, and more.
EDCs under the spotlight
The latest concerns raised regarding endocrine disrupting chemicals issues (EDCs) will undoubtedly lead to important changes in cosmetics manufacturing and regulations.
Under the REACH regulation, EDCs can be identified as substances of very high concern (SVHC), alongside chemicals known to cause cancer, mutations and reproductive toxicity. The goal is to reduce their use and, ultimately, replace them with safer products.
In January 2022, the French act of law “Agec” regarding the mandatory declaration of EDC use came into effect, according to an expanding list of such chemicals. This law applies to numerous items, including personal care products (PCPs). Such information will be made electronically available to the public and products intended for pregnant women will require a pictogram or other visual marker.
Nowadays, over 900 substances need to be evaluated for their potential endocrine activity. The remaining issue is the need for validated methods and integrated approaches to assess the potential endocrine activity.
Therefore, Eurofins is partnering with the PEPPER platform. Launched in 2019, the PEPPER platform aims to pre-validate characterisation methods for EDCs. This large international project involves public and private key stakeholders of the endocrine disruptors space.
