Vegan cosmetics are in vogue, but not for the reasons you would think

Paris and New York City — Salmon sperm facial treatments were the unlikely personal care hit of 2025, but this year, consumers and companies alike are asking: What if they could be vegan?

Products making vegan claims are proliferating in the cosmetic and personal care market well beyond what is needed to serve the small percentage of people who maintain a vegan diet. To a lot of consumers, vegan cosmetics mean plant-based, safe, and sustainable. To chemical companies, they mean the ingredients in those cosmetics are made from anything other than animal products.

And although the new products and ingredients are legitimately animal-free, the trend is less about animal welfare than it is about the maturation of industrial biotechnology and a search for stable supply chains.

The active ingredient in salmon sperm facial treatments is short strands of DNA called polydeoxyribonucleotides (PDRN). PDRN is marketed as suppressing skin-aging mechanisms and inflammation while stimulating collagen production and wound healing. At the beginning of the trend, PDRN was extracted from salmon sperm, but chemical firms are now rolling out versions made from plants or engineered microbes.

Vegan PDRN, then, was the hero ingredient at personal care and cosmetic ingredient conferences this year, including In-Cosmetics Global in Paris in April and Suppliers’ Day in New York City in May.

In Paris, the specialty chemical maker Clariant launched an algae-derived blend of PDRN and polysaccharides called AlgaSurge. The two components are both by-products of algae oil production, according to Philippe Daigle, who manages the active ingredient portfolio at Clariant’s Lucas Meyer Cosmetics division. Daigle said the PDRN fragments, which in this case are less than 100 base-pairs long, penetrate skin, while the high-molecular-weight sulfated polysaccharide forms a film to help retain moisture.

Clariant fast-tracked AlgaSurge when its R&D teams realized they had found a scalable, plant-based source of PDRN, Daigle said. The ingredient performs well in clinical trials, and ongoing research is elucidating legitimate mechanisms behind its claims, he said. On top of that, the advertising world was getting tired of the salmon story.

Trautec, by contrast, is one of several biotechnology firms making vegan PDRN through fermentation. The company was already making recombinant collagen and elastin proteins using genetically engineered microbes such as Escherichia coli, Jia Wang, a project leader at Trautec, told C&EN in Paris. The team accelerated its work on PDRN when the ingredient started trending, and it recently launched its flagship version—a tetrahedron of DNA strands measuring 21 base pairs on each side. That structure is important for penetrating deeper skin layers, Wang said.

Although vegan origins are a useful marketing claim, Wang said, the real trend is the biotechnology. Once used mainly to manufacture biotech drugs, genetic engineering and precision fermentation now work well at the scale needed for cosmetic active ingredients, she said. Being vegan is a by-product of the manufacturing process, not a driver unto itself.

Jianxi Xiao, cofounder of the ingredient start-up GZ Advanced Regenerative Medicine, said at the firm’s In-Cosmetics booth that fermentation makes a product line more consistent. “Animal supply chains are messy, chaotic, and prone to spoilage,” and extraction methods—either from plants or animals—often leave broken fragments of the target protein, DNA strand, or other biopolymer, he said.

What customers want for an active ingredient is the exact and complete sequence, folded correctly and biochemically active, Xiao said. Making recombinant organisms in a controlled fermenter offers constant, reliable supply—of human elastin fibers in the case of Xiao’s company.

BASF has launched multiple vegan biomolecules for the personal care market this year. NeoHelix Regenerate is a sequence of 20–30 amino acids that patches broken collagen helices, improving the plumpness and elasticity of skin. Katharina Kagerbauer, a science communications specialist at BASF, said in Paris that the firm is chemically synthesizing the ingredient while it works on a fermentation route.

The big chemical company also launched SkinNexus, a human-identical recombinant collagen grown in gene-edited yeast. The cheapest collagen on the market is extracted from animal tissues, and most of the rest uses bacterial collagen sequences, Kagerbauer said. “But the gold standard is human recombinant.”

Kagerbauer said the project started because BASF saw demand for vegan collagen. “Now, biotech and recombinant have become important claims on their own,” she said, because consumers associate those terms with greater efficacy.

Of course, conventional synthetic chemistry offers another way to make a vegan product. At both conferences, Shell Chemical primarily stressed the potential of its linear alkanes to replace silicones, but its marketing materials mention that they’re animal-free. Similarly, the chemical maker Sasol mentioned but didn’t emphasize the vegan nature of its palm kernel oil–derived linear decane, which also can replace silicone fluids.

Petrochemicals or palm oil might not please vegan consumers if what they’re after is environmental sustainability, says independent chemistry consultant Marta Pazos. At the same time, plant-based ingredients aren’t completely green, she says, because they’re often extracted and purified using solvents and other conventional chemistry.

Despite questions about the sustainability of vegan products, plant-based or biotech alternatives are swooping in to replace a host of animal products, including chondroitin sulfate, lanolin, gelatin, silk, squalene, and shellac.

One product you might not expect to be called vegan is tallow, given that tallow normally means rendered beef or sheep fat, but that’s what the green chemistry start-up Haus of Innovation featured at Suppliers’ Day. The alternative, based on shea butter, mimics the physicochemical properties of tallow, said Carolina Denman, the firm’s vice president for research and development.

Tallow is a trending ingredient in personal care, Denman said, but like other animal products, it’s inconsistent. The diet of the animals, the time of year, and variations in husbandry practices can change tallow’s properties, such as the ratio of oleic to linoleic acid.

Switching to plant or biotech feedstocks eliminates that variability, making it easier to get a consistent end product, Denman said. And as icing on the cake, “you don’t have to worry about smell or animal cruelty.”

Regulation is another driver of demand for vegan ingredients, especially in Europe, according to Juliette Prou, a sales manager at the plant-based ingredient maker Sophim. The firm’s headline ingredients are plant-derived squalene and its derivatives. The skin-softening lipid was originally extracted from shark livers, but that route is now banned in the European Union. Sophim already makes hundreds of metric tons per year of squalene from the pulp leftovers of olive oil production and is working on sunflower oil and other possible sources.

The ingredient maker P2 Science just rid its portfolio of the last animal-derived product, a petrolatum replacement that included beeswax along with the firm’s signature alkane ethers. “Vegan is a useful claim,” founder Patrick Foley told C&EN at Suppliers’ Day. He said the firm had already been reworking the formula for the product, called citrolatum P, to respond to customer feedback and saw an opportunity to get entirely out of animal ingredients.

“As an ingredient maker, it clarifies our messaging.” Foley said. “Brands, especially the ones interested in novel ingredients, have a strong preference to be cleanly animal-free.”

Another surprising category going vegan is glitter, an ingredient that has been through the materials science ringer. Stephen Cotton, a chemical engineer at the tiny-particle specialist Sigmund Lindner, said at In-Cosmetics that glitter was originally made of shellac, a biopolymer produced from the secretions of lac beetles. That gave way to plastic glitter made from polyester and polyurethane. But concerns over microplastics in recent years have made plastic glitter unacceptable.

Cotton worked on Sigmund Lindner’s efforts to develop another alternative, and the firm’s big news this year is that its personal care portfolio is now free of both shellac and microplastics. It has a glitter line made of the mineral mica and another, called Bioglitter, based on cellulose. Both types are metalized with aluminum.

Biodegradability was as important a parameter as veganism for the project, Cotton said, because EU regulations require that glitter be able to break down in freshwater environments. Bioglitter meets that standard, and the mica glitter, being made of rock, is exempt.

Though the word vegan was all over the convention halls in Paris and New York City, not everyone in the industry is convinced it’s the right focus.

Suppliers use the term as a proxy for various flavors of sustainability, said Kiley Larocque, regulatory affairs manager for the silk protein specialist Evolved by Nature. But consumers aren’t really putting vegan origins at the top of their personal care priority list, she said.

Evolved by Nature recently surveyed 900 people in the US, UK, and South Korea and found that vegan ranked 13th as a claim that cosmetics consumers actually care about. Biobased, biodegradable, renewable, sustainable, and cruelty-free are all much stronger drivers of purchasing behavior, according to the study (PDF), which the firm shared in talks and displays at In-Cosmetics.

Pazos says start-ups and other suppliers like to tout vegan origins because it quickly conveys a whole gamut of virtues. But she says the term is more useful in conversations with investors and brands than it is with individuals buying a finished product.

“The cosmetics industry is notoriously unregulated for claims, in particular in the US and especially compared with food and drugs,” Pazos says, so consumers should shop with a skeptical eye. “What is vegan to you? What do you want out of it?”