Personal care ingredients good enough to eat

 What’s the outlook for personal care ingredient trends this year? To find the answer, take a walk down your grocery aisles.

According to industry experts, no singular ingredient will come out of nowhere and rise to stardom in 2011. Instead, many ingredients that will appear in new personal care products are familiar to both you and your customers; they’re in-demand food ingredients that have migrated to beauty products.

“Ingredients that are already popular in food and drink markets are generally performing well in personal care applications,” says John Madden, head of ingredients research at Euromonitor, a global market-research company. “After all, if a consumer is happy to put something in their body, they are certainly going to be comfortable with putting it on their body. Health and wellness messages from the food and drinks industry tend to stick with consumers, so many are drawn to personal care products that contain recognized and trusted ingredients from their diet.”
Here’s the latest on three food ingredients that are on their way to your beauty aisles.

Antioxidant fruits
Berries and other antioxidant-rich fruits are now a common sight on grocery shelves in everything from tea to cereal. “The natural-health connotations of antioxidant-rich fruits and berries are making them particularly popular in health and wellness food and drinks,” says Madden, “so it is no surprise to see them extending into personal care.”

These ingredients, well known for their ability to scavenge harmful free radicals (plus they look and smell good), will continue to cross over to personal care in high numbers, says Laura Setzfand, vice president of marketing for Chatsworth, Calif.-based personal care company Nature’s Gate. The trend is bolstered by burgeoning research such as a recent Korean study showing that topical application of the antioxidant ellagic acid, found in numerous fruits like cranberries and pomegranates, prevents inflammation and collagen destruction. In particular, keep your eye out for personal care products infused with açaí, pomegranate and cranberry, as well as acerola, grape and goji berrry.

Açaí perhaps best exemplifies the food-to-beauty ingredient crossover. The recent introduction of an açaí hair care line by Garnier, a mass-market brand from cosmetics giant L’Oréal, will make the ingredient more high profile than ever. “Garnier is going to spend millions” of dollars to educate consumers [about açaí], says Setzfand, “so it becomes easier for a small player in the natural channel to introduce something with açaí—sometimes even products that have been in the pipeline for years.”