Roadmap

We buy raw materials and we find out what they are. That is the whole of our current capability, and it is more than most of this industry does.

• Identity and assay by UPLC with photodiode-array detection, where the material has a chromophore.
• Viscosity, melting range, solubility, hydration behaviour and functional testing at the bench.
• A harm-ranked framework: every material tiered by whether a contaminant could reach skin, and tested accordingly.
• A written incoming specification for each material — the test we run, and the test we send out.
• Publishing all of it, including the measurements that failed and the conclusions we could not reach.

So far: four Raw Material Files, two Open Lab notes, and one paper under peer review at a metrology journal.

And what we cannot do

• We have no products for sale. Nothing on this site is a product page.
• We cannot characterise a particle. No light scattering, no electron microscopy. That work is bought, and we say whose instrument it came from.
• We do not hold a certified reference standard for every material. Where we do not, a result supports batch-to-batch comparison and nothing more — and we say so, every time.
• No mass spectrometer, no NMR, no GC. Several of the tests we say matter most, we have to outsource.

Two tracks, running together. Neither is finished, and we publish them as they go rather than when they succeed.

Track one · Measurement

• Analytical methods validated to ICH Q2(R2) — specificity, linearity, accuracy, precision, robustness.
• Forced degradation with the mass balance closed. The published work on several cosmetic actives does not close it.
• Certified reference standards for every active we intend to claim.
• An identity method for polysaccharides, so a material sold under a name can be checked against that name.

Track two · Delivery

We are building toward a vesicular delivery system, and the first product will be a brightening serum. The evidence points somewhere counter-intuitive: for getting an active deeper into skin, the rigid phospholipid systems borrowed from injectable medicine are the wrong tool, because at skin temperature they are mechanically solid. The fluid, deformable systems are the ones with clinical evidence behind them.

Underneath that sits a question we intend to answer before building anything: does this active need a carrier at all? Encapsulation lowers the thermodynamic activity of a molecule, and the published work includes cases where every vesicle tested delivered less than the free active. We will run that comparison first, with a free-active control, and publish it whichever way it falls.

There is a ceiling on what this technology can honestly be said to do, and it is worth stating before we have anything to sell. No independent group has demonstrated intact vesicles in living skin tissue. The mechanism appears to be disruption of the barrier lipids and improved partitioning, not spheres carrying cargo into the dermis. Measured depths are tens of micrometres. Anyone describing it otherwise is ahead of the evidence.

The long-term ambition is to make the molecules rather than buy them: engineering microorganisms to produce the signalling compounds skin responds to, and matching them to individuals on the basis of measurement.

The first half is an established industry. Precision fermentation already produces squalane, collagen-like proteins, retinoid analogues and signalling peptides at commercial scale. It is a question of capability and capital, not of whether the science works.

The second half deserves more caution than it usually gets, so here is our own scepticism, plainly. Consumer skin genomics is at present largely unsubstantiated. The distance between a variant associating with a trait across a population and a recommendation for one person’s formulation is not bridged by current evidence, however many companies sell products as though it were.

So we are going at the goal through a different door: personalisation driven by what can be measured on a person— barrier function, pigmentation response, microbiome composition, how a formulation actually performs on them — rather than inferred from their genome. Same destination. Evidence we can generate and show.

This horizon has no dates, deliberately. It is a direction, not a schedule. If you find it described anywhere on this site in the present tense, that is an error and we would like to know.