Sweet Beauty, sweet touch, sweet application … sugar never ceases to be an inexhaustible source of innovation for cosmetics. The BBLAB 2012 edition will be devoted to it.

Considered detrimental to health in the collective mind, it nonetheless represents an enormous field of investigation in cosmetics, whether as a biological element essential to cellular activity or as the multi-active ingredient of a formula.

Sandie Jaidaine, who jointly planned the project, already predicts an encounter that will awaken the taste buds of innovation, “Sugar is the backbone of the DNA strand, it is therefore the origin of life, and BBLAB, through its presentations and conferences, will point out avenues of reflection and prospects for the future uses of sugars in cosmetics and, why not, on the transition of the genome to glycome?”

“A subject that has enormous potential for the industry”

 Gerard Redziniak knows the subject well. Former President of the Société Française de Cosmétologie (French Society of Cosmetology), he is at the origin of several patents stemming from glycoscience. He, together with a panel of experts, will be conducting a round table dedicated to this theme. “Sugar is an essential molecule because there is life on earth thanks to the existence of glucose; it is the elemental energy, the fuel of cells.

There are billions of combinations associated with sugars, so billions of possible molecules, while there are only a few hundred thousand proteins possible with the twenty or so amino acids. The multi-dispersion of sugars is much more varied. It is a subject that holds great promise for the industry; as soon as you start searching around sugars, you find them! That is what we will be looking at during this round table”.

A sweet space

“With our partners, formulators, experts, suppliers of ingredients … we will be able to dramatize this theme”, Sandie Jaidane says. “Sugar is endowed with multiple technological, metabolic and organoleptic qualities: polysaccharides are used as texturing agents, oligosaccharides as active biological agents, softening & stimulating, or anti-age (hyaluronic acid), the bio-saccharides as smoothing agents, other sugar derivatives as preservatives,…. glycoscience has not finished earning us new patents. So, how does one use glucides to make new active cosmetic ingredients? How does one integrate them into a green-technology methodology? How does one approach glycobiology? Or again, how does one explain the strong tendency towards cosmetic products termed ‘regressive’ that are gentle, with sweet fragrances (tropical fragrances, marshmallow and chocolate masks, candy soaps)… these are some of the many aspects that we will be exploring at BBLab”.

 Kristel Milet

Rendezvous from 10th to 12th September 2012 at BBLAB - CREATIVE BEAUTY PARIS