Emotion-hacking beauty: The ultimate guide to ingredients tapping this trend

By Julia Wray | Published: 10-Jul-2023

With exciting new launches hitting the market, Cosmetics Business seeks out other ingredients claiming to boost our mood but discovers there is contention surrounding the science of what makes us feel good

Mood beauty, or neurocosmetics, is not a brand new field. But ample launch activity in the specialty ingredients space suggests that the trend is close to bursting through into the finished products hitting our shelves.

This uptick comes a few months after neuroscientist, writer and broadcaster Baroness Greenfield, founder and CEO of Neuro-Bio, addressed the IFSCC 2022 Congress as a keynote speaker, stating: “We have a two-way street between the brain and the skin.”

“I’ve been interested in this topic for several years now and I’m happy to see that, slowly, and now actually faster and faster, the industry is getting interested in this neurocosmetic domain,” Karl Lintner, Henkel and Sederma veteran, and President of Kal’Idees, tells Cosmetics Business.

“Neurocosmetics, of course, do not have a real definition,” adds Lintner, but he points to a “sort-of” definition given by dermatologist Professor Laurent Misery in 2002, in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science.

Misery’s definition of neurocosmetics are products which “are supposed to modulate neuro-immuno-cutaneous-system functioning at the epidermal level”.

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