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Greetings, skin microbiome enthusiasts!
I have some news this week that feels both professionally significant and personally meaningful to share with you.
This year has been an unexpectedly prolific one on the research side. Last month, a review paper I co-authored with Jane P. Fife and Kelly Smith was published in Industrial Biotechnology (Mary Ann Liebert): From Microbe to Market: A Practical Roadmap for Biological Product Development (doi.org/10.1177/15509087251408992). That one was rooted in my years in agricultural biotechnology and biomanufacturing, the world I came from before skincare.
And now, a second paper has just been published online, this time in Biotechnology and Bioengineering (Wiley), and this one lands much closer to what I am building at Fafabiotic. It is titled A Microbial Formulation Perspective on Probiotic Skincare: Viability, Challenges, and Current Approaches to Maintain Probiotic Viability, and you can find it here: doi.org/10.1002/bit.70268
Two peer-reviewed papers in one year, while running a company. I will be honest: this was not accidental. This year, I made a decision that visibility matters, and to me, visibility is not just about showing up on social media. It is about contributing to the scientific conversation, putting what I know into the literature, and making knowledge accessible to others. Review papers are one of the best vehicles for that. They synthesize what exists, they identify the gaps, and they give both researchers and practitioners a map of where the field actually stands.
That has been the intention behind both papers, and this one is no exception.
Everything I have built at Fafabiotic starts with a question that most of the skincare industry has not seriously tried to answer: if you are going to claim that your product contains probiotics, are those probiotics actually alive?
I mean that literally. It is a formulation science problem. And it turns out it is one of the most underexplored challenges at the intersection of microbiology and cosmetics.
I spent over 15 years in agricultural biotechnology formulating live microbial products for crops, soil, and animal health. In those industries, viability is not a marketing concept. It is a technical requirement. You measure it, you protect it, you validate it, and you do not release a product until you know the microbes inside it are alive, functional, and stable.
When I entered the skincare world, I was genuinely surprised by how different the standards were.
The review opens with the human microbiome, because that is the right place to start. The human body hosts a vast and dynamic microbial ecosystem that influences immunity, metabolism, and tissue function. The skin, as the body’s largest organ and its primary interface with the environment, has its own microbiome that plays a direct role in barrier function, inflammation regulation, and how your skin looks and behaves day to day.
Consumer and scientific interest in this space has grown rapidly, and the market for probiotic, prebiotic, and postbiotic skincare has expanded alongside it. But here is the part that I think deserves far more attention than it gets.
Most commercial products in this space do not contain live microbes.
They contain non-viable microbial derivatives: fermented extracts, lysates, filtrates, postbiotics. These ingredients can have real value, and I am not dismissing them. But they are not probiotics in the scientific sense of the word. A probiotic, by the internationally accepted definition established by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, is a live microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confers a health benefit on the host. The word live is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The paper digs into why the industry has defaulted to non-viable alternatives. It comes down to three intersecting challenges: formulation, regulation, and stability.
Formulating live microbes into a cosmetic product is technically demanding. Most conventional skincare formulations contain preservatives, which are there for a very good reason: to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria and mold that could harm the consumer. The problem is that those same preservatives are often lethal to the beneficial bacteria you are trying to deliver. Getting a live probiotic to survive in that environment, through manufacturing, through shipping, through months of storage on a shelf or in someone’s bathroom, requires purpose-built solutions that most of the industry has not invested in.
Packaging matters. Activation matters. Water activity matters. pH matters. The strain you choose matters enormously, because different species and even different strains of the same species behave very differently under stress.
The paper reviews the current landscape of strategies and technologies that can actually address these challenges, from encapsulation to anhydrous formulations to dual-chamber delivery systems, and outlines what still needs to be studied.
This paper is, in many ways, the scientific articulation of the problem I set out to solve when I founded this company.
The Bloom delivery system I developed, where the probiotics remain dormant and protected in a dry state and are activated by the customer before first use, exists precisely because I understood the formulation science well enough to know that there was no other honest way to deliver live bacteria in a skincare product. It is not a unique or clever workaround. It is the scientifically logical response to a real technical constraint.
Writing this review gave me the opportunity to map out the full landscape of that constraint for a scientific audience, and to point toward what rigorous, evidence-based probiotic skincare actually requires.
Whether you are a researcher, a formulator, a brand founder, or someone who simply wants to understand what is actually in the probiotic skincare products you are buying, this paper is written to give you a clearer picture.
The field is young. The science is promising. But the gap between what is marketed and what is actually delivered is real, and it is worth understanding.
If you have access to the journal, I hope you will read it. And if you have questions about anything it covers, you are always welcome to reach out.
Until next week, cheers.
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