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Cosmetic chemistry, or the science of making beauty products, is a complex process that requires understanding how ingredients interact with each other and with the skin.
With so many variables to consider — safety, shelf lifespan, texture, and appearance — the process of blending ingredients for face creams, eye shadows, lipsticks, and other cosmetics can be time-consuming for chemists, who typically conduct independent research to figure out which compounds and minerals can work together to create a safe, effective, and sellable product.
Albert Invent, based in Oakland, California, seeks to simplify this process for chemists with its digital platform called Albert.
The company’s CEO, Nick Talken, said Albert enables chemists to research and develop safe, high-performing products without the need to refer to the notebooks and spreadsheets where they typically store data. Since Albert integrates data that’s already been stored in electronic lab notebooks and laboratory information management systems, chemists can come up with test-worthy formulations in less time.
How AI can help chemists develop safe and effective cosmetics
Albert is trained on more than 15 million molecular structures, Talken said. When chemists — from companies like the adhesive and cleaning supplies manufacturer Henkel, the Teflon-maker Chemours, and the chemical manufacturing company Nouryon — use the platform, they can look up which permutations of molecules will work best to achieve a specific goal.
The platform was designed to capture the kind of information that chemists typically track in notebooks or on spreadsheets, such as the materials and substances they might use, their compositions, and processing steps.
When a chemist asks Albert for input on which other substances work well with a particular ingredient, the system offers feedback on possible substance combinations and predicts the physical, toxicological, and visual properties of new compounds before they are synthesized in a lab. This AI-driven analysis gives formulators the opportunity to determine whether a concoction is safe and effective to produce, or whether they should scrap the idea, in minutes.
Albert Invent partnered with Nouryon, which owns a collection of formulation strategies for the personal care industry (think cosmetics, hair care, and skincare products) that have been cleared as effective and safe. The result: a digital platform for developing new cosmetics formulations, called BeautyCreations.
Instead of employing the traditional product-development methods of trial and error and real-time experimentation — methods that can typically take anywhere from four to six weeks — Nouryon’s chemists can use BeautyCreations to look through the company’s existing formulations for hair and skincare products and filter for results that match their desired safety standards and marketing claims, all while adhering to stringent development timelines.
David Freidinger, the vice president of personal care and pharma at Nouryon, said this technology has enabled the company’s chemists to develop new products from almost anywhere in the world. It’s also improved the speed and quality of Nouryon’s internal product development, as the company can look at BeautyCreations data to better understand market trends and prioritize development initiatives accordingly.
An AI tool for chemistry beyond cosmetics
Arthur Tisi, a former CTO and chief information officer who advises private equity and portfolio companies on digital technology strategies, said that the molecular AI technology behind Albert could be of use to other data-heavy industries in the future.
“The ability to ‘digitalize’ our technical expertise and make it available to customers 24/7 enables accelerated scaling and efficiency in customer support,” Tisi wrote in a recent email to BI. He added that tools like Albert are powerful because they offer both product-formula data and consumer insights.
Tisi said that in the future, the value of molecular AI will go beyond its speed benefits. He said that this technology has the potential to uncover certain chemical formulations that scientists might miss.
Freidinger said industries that use reams of empirical data to create products or deliver services could benefit from AI tools like Albert to improve speed and quality.
“The same technology that speeds up skincare development can revolutionize personalized medicine, where rapidly identifying the perfect molecular combinations could mean delivering custom-targeted therapies for individual patients, potentially turning fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions,” Freidinger said.
Meanwhile, Talken said that Albert has the potential to be used for inventing new polymers and batteries.
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