How Science Is Advancing Beauty’s Quest for Longevity at Warp Speed
PARIS — Beauty keeps shape-shifting, with health, well-being then longevity becoming key components of its development. Now, the convergence of these tenets and scientific advances are catapulting the industry into new directions, including “age-reverse.”
This is happening at warp speed.
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“[Longevity] has been emerging in the mainstream for the past three to five years, and now it’s really reaching a critical mass of real applications that are coming into the clinic, into the market,” said Marco Quarta, chief executive officer of Rubedo Life Science, a company targeting cellular senescence.
Longevity is about health span, finding ways for people to experience more healthful and beauty-full lives for a longer period.
“If I had to sum up what is longevity, it is adding life to our years and not years to our life,” said Anne Colonna, global head of advanced research at L’Oréal.
The science feeding into longevity has reached a pivot point, with a convergence of fields such as epigenetics and micro-nutrition opening its next chapter.
“There is an acceleration of the science in this field,” said Virginie Couturaud, scientific communications director at Parfums Christian Dior.
That allows, for instance, brands to start working with actives differently, making “age-reverse” skin care no longer just a pipe dream, but the reality of now.
Today, the care of skin — the body’s largest organ — is in the scopes. “But in the very near future, it will be true also for all signs of aging,” said Colonna.
“It’s absolutely the future in every respect,” Justin Boxford, global brand president of Estée Lauder, said of longevity. “It’s a multigenerational story that is capturing all ages.”
He said longevity “has never been more relevant and will continue to be more and more relevant as we look at the future.”
Beauty behemoths know they can’t go it alone, so are teaming with external experts on the quest for longevity.
Estée Lauder, whose scientists began exploring sirtuins, aka longevity proteins, 15 years ago, revealed its Skin Longevity platform in December 2023. The brand put together a longevity expert collective culling multiple disciplines to educate consumers to reconsider how they approach skin care and lifestyle.
“We are looking at continuing to advance new ways to define, measure and evaluate longevity, as it pertains to aesthetics in the skin as well as our longevity collective,” said Jennifer Palmer, senior vice president, global skin care and brand scientific authority strategy at Estée Lauder.
The brand is also supporting the Stanford Center on Longevity and its new program on aesthetics and culture.
Beiersdorf AG in April said it had inked a multiyear partnership with Rubedo Life Science.
“Our focus is on a fundamental problem in biology, specific in the biology of aging, which is cellular senescence,” said Quarta.
Senescence is a cell’s loss of the power for division and growth, due to stress and damage from, for instance, UV light or air pollution. Once a cell becomes senescent, it secretes factors around it, into the tissue.
“It can call the immune cells to find them and get rid of them,” he explained.
If the senescent cells remain and accumulate, they cause chronic inflammation. This can cause tissue degeneration, fibrosis or wrinkling, among other effects.
“The solution is drugs that specifically can remove those senescence cells,” said Quarta, referring to senolytics. The first generation of these, from five years ago, lacked safety and selectivity.
“We built Robedo to make the tools to find and discover the right type of senescence cells in the right tissue, in the right disease,” he continued. Quarta’s company built a platform to analyze that and uses artificial intelligence to triangulate the complexity.
Aside from disease, this can be used to identify senescence cells causing the likes of skin aging. Robedo applies novel chemistry to translate findings into molecules.
“Now we have the next generation of senolytics that are very selective, very specific, for the right type of senescence cells in the right place,” said Quarta.
His sites are on cosmetics, too. One of Robedo’s lead programs going into the clinic this year is for dermatological chronic inflammatory skin conditions.
“We found that there are senescence cells of the skin that persist, and they cause this transition from acute inflammation to chronic inflammation,” said Quarta. “We found how to target them, and we make molecules that can eliminate them.”
When the senescence cells are removed, such lesions start to heal and disappear, and skin becomes healthier. That is the sort of work Robedo is doing with Beiersdorf now.
“Our partnership revolves around the exploration of novel compounds derived from Rubedo’s extensive research programs, specifically targeting cellular senescence,” said Marc Winnefeld, head of applied skin research at Beiersdorf.
Beiersdorf’s partnership with Rubedo specifically centers on the study of new compounds with senolytic and anti-inflammatory properties.
“The partnership aligns with our ambition to lead in skin care innovation,” said Winnefeld. “With our combined expertise, Beiersdorf and Rubedo aim to develop a next breakthrough antiaging solution for the face care market.”
Their first joint product could come to market as soon as a couple of years from now. And their findings could ultimately have applications on hair growth, fragility and coloration, too.
Beiersdorf, through its Oscar & Paul Corporate Venture fund, is also an investor in Rubedo, which in April closed a $40 million series A financing round.
Beiersdorf is not new to longevity. It has since 2008 been working with an interdisciplinary team on reactivating silenced youth genes to turn back skin cells’ biological clocks using epigenetics.
“The outcome is promising,” said Gitta Neufang, senior vice president global R&D at Beiersdorf. “Beiersdorf will launch its first epigenetic skin care products this year.”
The epigenome is a key piece of the longevity puzzle. DNA has genes, which store genetic information, and the epigenome is a layer above that, which is influenced by the environment.
“This layer can decide what gene will be expressed,” said Eliron Yaron, founder and chairman of Onassis Holding Corp., an OTC-listed wellness and biotech-focused company that is raising up to $75 million in a Regulation A+ financing round in the U.S.
“There is a biological clock in the cells,” he continued, and that can be reversed. “There are some things that you can do outside of the DNA and actually influence the DNA of that cell to rejuvenate.”
Onassis in June 2022 launched a subsidiary called Ananda Labs Inc., which teamed with Yosef Buganim at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose laboratory specializes in using stem cell biology and nuclear reprograming technologies. The professor found four proteins with which it is possible to rejuvenate cells, or organs, safely in the body, according to Yaron.
“We are going to rejuvenate the immune system,” he said. “It’s preventative medicine. We think we can take any, let’s say, 60-year-old man or woman and rejuvenate their immune system [cells] in two months. By this, we will expand their healthy lifespan.”
The number of years of their life might be increased, too, all at a democratic price, said Yaron.
His company has another division in which it is rejuvenating fibroblasts, skin’s stem cells.
“In the treated area, your body will generate more collagen, more elasticity and will heal scars much faster,” said Yaron.
He plans to invest tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in upcoming years to research how to rejuvenate everything related to hair, graying and loss.
Nutrition is another field linked to longevity. In January, Timeline, a Swiss longevity biotech company developing solutions for the food, beauty and health sectors, secured 56 million Swiss francs, or $61.8 million, in a funding round that was oversubscribed and led by L’Oréal’s venture capital fund, Business Opportunities for L’Oréal Development, or BOLD.
Timeline began its operations in 2008 with a focus on wellness and nutrition.
“The question that we had when we started the company was: How do we empower people and give [them] access to products that are going to act on key pathways that can help them prevent and optimize the function of their body at whatever point in their life they’re at,” said Chris Rinsch, a cofounder of Timeline.
It developed a post-biotic called Urolithin A, which is difficult to obtain from nature or a person’s diet. What the Timeline team found was that Urolithin A is an active molecule.
“We discovered it acts on the mitochondria, which are the power plants inside of all of our cells,” he said. These are important for optimal cell functioning and, therefore, cellular metabolism.
“It’s been shown that mitochondrial functional decline is one of the key culprits of aging,” said Rinsch.
As the mitochondria produces more energy for the cells, it gets damaged. Cells have an internal process, Pac-Man-like, that cleans up the damaged mitochondria so it can be recycled and renewed, and more healthy mitochondria can be created.
“It’s a very dynamic process,” said Rinsch. “That’s what keeps our cells functioning, because if our mitochondria wasn’t recycled like this, the cells would die.”
But the recycling declines with age and isn’t always optimal in younger people for lifestyle or genetic reasons.
The company began with oral nutrition products that stimulate mitochondria’s recycling. Its patented Mitopure, which unlocks a precise dose of Urolithin A, helps with mitochondria health in muscle.
“Our active is working on a key pathway of longevity,” said Rinsch, who likened this finding to that of omega-3 in the early 2000s.
Then a few years ago, Timeline began looking into how Mitopure works topically, and began developing products that can be applied to the face. There is now a day cream, a night cream and a serum, and the team is developing other products.
“We see a change in the cells that is more supportive of a healthy collagen matrix, which is very important,” said Rinsch, adding they’ve noted an improvement and reduction in wrinkles.
“I don’t see us as an antiwrinkle cream. It is more of a product that’s for the health and longevity of your skin,” said Rinsch. “Wrinkles are healthy.”
With the topical applications, an anti-inflammatory component has been perceived, as well.
“We see a reduction following exposure to UV light,” said Rinsch, as an example. So it works on both intrinsic aging and extrinsic aging.
In March, L’Oréal unveiled what it considers a breakthrough in the field of longevity: Melasyl, a molecule created over 20 years to prevent the development of skin pigmentation marks that can lead to age spots and post-acne marks.
“Discovering this ingredient marks a new era,” said Colonna. “It brings a new dimension to beauty, which is not only correcting, but also predicting and reversing the aging of our skin.”
Dior is also focused on “reverse-aging.” Couturaud described this not as a fight against clinical signs of aging, but “to have this harmony and a good balance with our biological age and chronological age.”
Advances are being made on which biomarkers to home in on to identify biological age, which is not timed with a clock. At Dior, which has created a scientific advisory board on reverse-aging, they’re testing the impact of some formula extracts on different biomarkers with the targets of senescence and inflammaging. That is low-grade inflammation that develops with age, for instance.
“If you act at the same time on different biomarkers you are more powerful than if you act on one or two biomarkers,” said Couturaud, adding extracts from flowers work well on various biomarkers.
Ingredients acting on various mechanisms in skin cells are more efficient than antiaging molecules, she explained.
The research on longevity is structuring Dior’s science. Some of the brand’s products already have longevity claims, such as Dior Prestige La Crème.
“Today, we have identified and deciphered why our product is very efficient. With La Micro-Huile de Rose it’s micro-nutrition, and with Le Nectar Premier it’s senescence,” said Couturaud, adding these can have a synergistic effect. “If you add the different products, you act on different hallmarks at the same time in your daily routine.”
She noted burgeoning scientific interest in understanding the molecule rapamycin’s effect on reverse-aging. Ditto for metformin and Ozempic.
“Nutrition is a big field today we want to address, because nutrition is essential for the skin functioning,” said Couturaud.
Estée Lauder’s Re-Nutriv skin care line — especially its recent Ultimate Diamond Transformation Brilliance Soft Crème — also has age-reverse technology, acting on sirtuins.
“We have the ability to reactivate them,” said Boxford. That’s thanks to the brand’s exclusive and patented Sirtivity-LP technology, which Estée Lauder claims not only slows but help visibly reverse skin aging.
“It turns on a network of biological actions in the skin,” said Palmer.
Sirtivity-LP technology has cascaded into Estée Lauder’s color cosmetics, too.
“We have this ability to change the conversation from anti-age to age-reversal,” said Boxford. “This is just the beginning. We see this going beyond products into amazing services and the way we analyze skin. This is going to go into so many new territories.
“[Longevity] will probably be the fastest-growing category in beauty globally,” he said.
“The field of longevity has truly exploded,” said Palmer.
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