Marine ingredients focus: a look at marine products

In personal care, the popularity of marine-derived cosmetic ingredients is not only due to their efficacy, but also the connotations they come with. Consumers associate the sea with purity and freshness, two extremely important characteristics for personal care products, and skin care in particular. This is a deeplyingrained association that has lead people to use sea flora as a skin care ingredient for many centuries as well as in soap, cleansers, and more recently shaving foams and shampoos. The long medical and cosmetic history of seaweed is only recently being expanded to include other types of marine flora and microbes. The possibilities are almost endless, partly because relatively little of the marine ecosystem has so far been scientifically explored, leaving countless numbers of potentially useful chemical substances to wait for their moment in the laboratory spotlight.

 Into the deep

The search for new marine-derived substances is a fascinating area of modern science and is taking researchers to some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. Microbes known as extremophiles can be found living in and around areas such as hydrothermal vents and the deep sea, and are redefining our concept of what constitutes a ‘liveable’ environment, therefore revealing their tactics for defence against extremes of heat, pH, and UV. This will prove incredibly useful, as these abilities can be studied and then transferred into applications for use in our less extreme environment. From these microbes, potential ingredients can be created that offer antiinflammatory and antioxidant qualities as well as UV protection. But as has been shown in other quests for natural products, a sudden spike in interest can result in damage to a particularly fragile ecosystem, and care must be taken to ensure that does not happen with marine ingredients. Thankfully there is already considerable focus on sustainability from the leading ingredient companies. Techniques such as bio-processing allow for the production of organisms on an industrial scale for harvesting, which protects the original marine environments from additional disruption. Following is a look at four of the rapidly growing number of marine-derived cosmetic ingredients available on the market. Illustrated in these examples is the increased interest surrounding marine exopolysaccharides, which are obtained via the bio-processing system described above. This is likely to be a very significant area for personal care ingredients in the future, and it will be interesting to see how quickly the number of new products increases over the coming years.