The oceans and seas are a great place to find natural actives and function materials for personal care products. They are the last great untapped resource.
Despite covering more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, only a tiny proportion on their full potential is being used in personal care. We are familiar with using marine materials. We use everything from seawater (called ‘thalassotherapy’) to a huge range of extracts made from seaweed, microalgae, plankton, coral and many other marine organisms in personal care, but this is just the tip of the potential ‘commercial iceberg’. Formulations can be readily thickened or gelled with carrageenan, alginates (cold-soluble and cold-setting), agar or agarose, (all extracted from seaweed). Even the sand, mud and silt that settle on the ocean floor can have a place in cosmetics. The most exciting new materials are coming from the very deep sea. The water below 1,500 metres remains largely unexplored. This is the largest habitat on earth (covering more than 60% of our planet). The cliché that ‘more people have travelled into space than have travelled to the deep ocean’ may have become a little over-used but it does help get into perspective the remoteness of Earth’s ‘flooded basement’, the abyssal zone which harbours organisms called extremophiles which are proving to be very interesting to cosmetic scientists.
Universities and Scientific establishments such as the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts have been studying the organisms recovered from these extreme depths. One special extracellular polysaccharide (Deepsane) has been isolated from cultured Alteromonas macleodii. This gammaproteobacterium strain normally lives in the sea at depths between 1000 m and 3500 m.
Clinical studies have shown that Deepsane has cosmetic benefits. It is a very effective anti-inflammatory. It significantly reduces ICAM-1 expression while also protecting langerhans cells, which are essential players in the skin's immune system. In addition, aqueous extracts containing Deepsane help repair damaged skin through IL-1 regulation.
Keep an eye out for the full article on marine ingredients from IMCD coming soon in Personal Care magazine.
