A look into the future of cosmetic measurement and testing: COMET2019
- TRI Princeton
- Feb 6, 2019
- 2 min read
Samuel Gourion-Arsiquaud and Paul Cornwell attended COMET2019 on February 6-7 in Cergy, France.
COMET is short for Cosmetic Measurement and Testing, and is a meeting organized by Cosmetic Valley France together with the University of Cergy-Pontoise. This year was the third year for this event which was attended by 200+ people.
Cosmetic Valley France connects and supports hundreds of start-up cosmetic companies and perfumery businesses in France. It has helped create many thousands of new jobs in the industry over its 25 years of existence, and clearly, as evidenced by many of the presentations at the meeting, helps foster high quality cosmetics research and innovation.
Samuel gave a very well received podium presentation titled “Assess and visualise skin damages inside the stratum corneum associated with environmental stresses (UV, ozone) by vibrational spectroscopy.” There were many other interesting presentations, covering a wide range of topics from formulation design, to skin biology, to sensory testing. The conference also had 30+ poster displays, and 20+ supplier stands. One theme running through the conference was the linking of technical measurements with sensory test methods. Clarins, for example, showed how they are now able to correlate rheological and tribology data on skin care formulations with expert panel assessments. Brenntag also showed how foam testing data can also link to panel scores for shampoo tests. Linking the testing done on skin and hair in TRI with sensory cues would be an interesting area to investigate in the future.
The conference finished with a fascinating plenary talk by Professor Muhammad Ali Imran from Glasgow University who described his work on nano-scale sensors for use inside the skin for sensing skin health, and the creation of communication technologies that can use this information to help consumers of the future look better after their skin. It felt like science fiction is quickly becoming reality!
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