Will the cosmetics of the future be grown in a Petri dish?

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Cosmetics production is not the most attractive business. Many ingredients are of animal origin, and their extraction harms the environment. Startup Arcaea has chosen a different approach: to develop cells with specific goals and create functionally new ingredients. For example, keratin for shampoo, thanks to which hair will remember the desired shape, or sunscreen, which will make the skin more resistant to sunlight.



Arcaea founder and CEO Yasmin Aganovic has spent her career thinking about how biotechnology could change the beauty industry. In 2015, she founded Mother Dirt, a startup that uses live phone number list bacteria to cleanse the skin without harming the good bacteria in our bodies. In 2019, Yasmin left the company to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Ginkgo Bioworks incubator, where she founded Arcaea.

She was drawn to Ginkgo’s manufacturing platform, which allows scientists to program cells in the same way we program computers. She describes it as “a laboratory where instead of lots of scientists with pipettes, Ginkgo combines biology with artificial intelligence and robots. It allows us to understand cells and program cells at scale,” she explains.

Ginkgo became famous for being able to sequence the DNA of flower cells that disappeared several centuries ago, and then recreated the scents for a museum exhibit.