The global beauty industry is undergoing tremendous changes driven, in part, by technology, biology and regulations. We asked Akshay Talati, head of new product development and innovation, Goop, for his thoughts on a trend or two that's having the biggest impact on product formulation in the next five years. But Talati went even further. He gave us five trends that industry is tapping into to find the next beauty breakthrough.

1. Personalized Future-Biome

Altering skin’s microbiome “permanently” for the better is a great vision but no one has nailed it yet. I foresee personalized microbiome-based products will be created with cultures swabbed from human skin when it was at its near-to-ideal state; i.e., during our childhood years, for future use. Cultures will be frozen and mobilized in the future to create products that will attempt to reverse the imbalance in skin microbiome in adulthood back to the glorious minimally adulterated young skin days. We will have a new scale of skin types based on “microbiome-types,” beyond traditional skin typing models.

2. Artificial Intelligence, aka AI

It is the next buzzword, and we will see it come to the frontline and startups pitching everything from smart formulation software to designing personalized formulas, fingerprinting formula textures, duplicating benchmarks, as well as algorithms to predict stability even before a batch is made in the lab. Raw material manufacturers will use AI-driven tools to efficiently screen through hundreds of natural and synthetic molecules, isolating active materials from whole plant extracts, as well as creating new molecules for targeted markers. AI-driven apps will elevate in-home product experiences through virtual product try-ons in 3D with predictive models of product performance and real-time visualization. Language processing tools like ChatGPT will start writing editorial, PR columns, marketing copies and even consumer communications.

All of the recent trends in the beauty industry represent a first-world and developed market outlook that reflects a rich culture with abundant choice and leisure time (aka macro-trends). However, we are overlooking what’s on the mind of a demographic that includes low-income, third-world, unhealthy, and unschooled populations. Most of these weak and emerging signals (micro-trends) get filtered by the human bias of economics. AI will have a distinct advantage of beating humans to detect concepts undetectable to the human eye due to the large volume of data and human bias. AI will be excellent at finding these beauty micro-trends that humans cannot spot and will bring balance to identifying cultural traditions, ancient wisdom and diversity trendspotting.

3. Re-emergence of “Beyond Animal” Based Cosmetics

With the popularity of Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, lab-grown ingredients mimicking ingredients such as collagen, elastin, milk enzymes, animal proteins, cholesterol, carmine, lanolin and fish oils will become more mainstream and economical.

4. Biology Driving Chemistry

The next decade will bring biology to the forefront with a focus on innovation through biotech, bio-fermentation and bio-cultures to create new possibilities. For the past few decades, chemistry has driven biology to the forefront of new drug innovation but now biology and genetic engineering will drive chemistry to unleash a new palette of biotech beauty and most likely the source of a new hero ingredient. Next-generation functional ingredients will be lab-engineered focusing on biomimicry, exploring human growth factors and cosmeceutical pro-drugs complexed of pharmaceutical actives with cosmetic carriers. The energy crisis will further spur the need for sustainable innovation with low-energy production processes and improving the environmental footprint of existing materials.

5. Rise of Social Wellness

Young people are aging with “apps” and lacking authentic human connection leading to a loneliness epidemic thanks to the work-from-home and TikTok culture. To combat this, civic-minded beauty brands will have a new mission of “social media deceleration” and will create programs to encourage the social mingling of their followers and like-minded beauty junkies outside of their phone screens.