Fast Talk: Beauty Ingestibles

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photograph by Jesse Frohman

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photograph by Asger Carlsen

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Nutricosmetics: Potions That Make You Pretty

Kimberly Cooper
Chief Beauty Officer
Glowelle
Glendale, California

Nestlé's Emotional Cocktail

Kimberly Cooper, 33, was a brand manager at Nestlé U.S.A. in 2006 when she pitched her bosses the idea of a beauty drink. Two weeks later, she was running Nestlé's first American foray into nutricosmetics. Glowelle debuted this fall in Bergdorf Goodman and 45 Neiman Marcus stores.

"The beauty market is so different from the food-and-beverage business. In the beauty industry, people buy products not just for the results but also for how they make them feel emotionally and how they represent their personality. In interviews with hundreds of women, the idea of confident beauty came up a lot: It isn't just about covering things up, it's about a ritual that's empowering and nourishing.

We're Nestlé but we're also a startup beauty company, so our goal is to build credibility. We started in prestige locales like Neiman Marcus. We have to educate consumers about what this category is and make them much more open to the idea that what you consume does affect how you look and feel. [Market researcher] Datamonitor projects that this will be a $1.3 billion business by 2012, but when I started in 2006, that number was only $800,000. We're creating a whole new category that fuses food, nutrition, and beauty -- and accessing all of the emotions women have about appearance and food."

Serge Rogasik
Global Marketing Director, Beauty-Care Solutions
BASF
New york

BASF's Message in a Bottle

Serge Rogasik, 40, is a biochemist by training who is now in charge of marketing of the beauty-technology-and-chemistry division for the $79 billion BASF corporation. It has been developing high-end ingredients to sell to companies such as Avon, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, and Procter & Gamble.

"We see nutricosmetics as part of a larger trend that we call 'sustainable humanity,' in which holistic treatments replace toxin-based ones. We're already using food-science technology in skin care: Lys'lastin is a dill extract that helps reenergize the elastin dormant in aging skin; Smartvector UVCE releases vitamins C and E when skin is exposed to UV. For an extreme example of what's possible, you start with algae that costs 5 cents a kilo and from that create algae extract that costs $50 a kilo. Then you can create an encapsulated algae-extract complex that you sell for $100 to $1,000 a kilo so that a customer can retail a beauty product at up to $50,000 a kilo. This is what we do: supply a very trendy market with high-tech solutions. As we learn more about topical skin applications and ingestible ones, synergies will be possible. The vitamin will hit layers of the skin that are tough to get to from the outside. Expect to see breakthroughs in the next 12 to 36 months."

Francesco and Margo Marrone
Cofounders
The Organic Pharmacy
London

Love Potion

Margo Marrone, 42, and her husband, Francesco, 44, tackle their customers' beauty problems using an inside-out approach and featuring herbs, supplements, and tinctures. Their four London pharmacies and Web site generate $10 million annually; a U.S. branch opened in Beverly Hills in November.

"My husband and I are partners. My background is scientific, his is design. He wanted the Organic Pharmacy to look completely different; he hates anything that's rustic. We have 400 SKUs, which I've formulated and we hand-make in our Battersea laboratory. I'm a licensed pharmacist and homeopath, so we're not a bunch of housewives who cooked something up in the kitchen.

Our approach to everything -- absolutely everything -- is internal and external. When someone comes in with an acne problem, we wouldn't just give her face creams. We look at lifestyle, talk about any hormonal imbalance, consider doing a detox, and discuss the available options. Health and beauty go together. It's not just one or the other. We opened in the Los Angeles area first, because we believed that people there were already educated to this approach. We're looking at Hong Kong and Japan next."

Jay Tiesman
Principal Scientist/Genomics Group Leader
Procter & Gamble
Cincinnati

P&G's Environmental Elixir

Jay Tiesman, 45, has a PhD in pathology. A 15-year P&G veteran, his focus for the past decade has been on genomics, applying technology from the semiconductor industry to biochemical research in order to bring a new efficiency to beauty R&D.