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• How to speed up beauty product development without sacrificing quality
• Multifunctional cosmetic formulation: How one base serves many products
• What modern beauty consumers expect from skincare and personal care products
• Sustainable beauty formulation: The efficiency benefits of solid and waterless formats
• What this means for brands on Covalo

🎧 This article is adapted from the Beauty Beat Pod – a podcast by Covalo.
Tune in here. 

Speed. Sensory experience. Sustainability. Fun. The list of things modern beauty consumers expect from a single product keeps growing, and the brands keeping the pace aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest R&D budgets. They're the ones that have figured out how to build smarter from the start.

Together with Charlotte (Product Strategy Manager) and Joe (Creative Marketing Specialist) at Stephenson, we talked about what's really driving beauty innovation right now. The conversation covered a lot of ground — from the collapse of traditional consumer tiers to the rise of waterless formats — but one idea kept surfacing: flexible formulation is quietly becoming one of the most powerful tools a beauty brand can have. Here are our key takeaways. 

How to speed up beauty product development without sacrificing quality

Traditional product development used to run on a two-to-three year cycle. That worked when trends moved seasonally. It doesn't work when TikTok can make and bury a micro-trend in a matter of weeks. 

"Brands that are winning are the ones who have been able to build speed into their process from the start," Joe explains. But speed alone isn't the answer — the bigger problem is what's eating up development time in the first place.

"A lot of that slowness actually comes from starting from scratch every single time," says Charlotte. "You have to re-evaluate raw materials, run new compatability tests, new stability trials – everything included with that. Looking from a proven, versatile base cuts out around 40 to 60% of your development time." That's a fundamental change in how fast a brand can move. 

Multifunctional cosmetic formulation: How one base serves many products

The concept of flexible formulation rests on a simple but powerful idea: a well-chosen base can do far more than formulators traditionally asked of it. Charlotte uses liquid soap as an example: the same surfactant base that underpins an everyday hand wash can, with the right additions, become a premium molten shower gel stocked in high-end retailers. It's the same chemistry with a different story.

The same logic applies at the ingredient level. "You can have one ingredient that does three different functions," Charlotte notes, pointing to polyglyceryl esters as an example: an ingredient that can act as an emulsifier in a massage oil, a moisturizer in a night cream, and a cleansing agent in a cleansing oil. "It's easier for formulators and also cheaper sometimes."

For brands, this flexibility is commercially freeing. "They don't have to choose between speed and quality, and they don't have to choose between mass appeal and premium positioning," says Joe. "Once the foundation is solid, they can build their identity around it."

What modern beauty consumers expect from skincare and personal care products

Today's beauty buyer is harder to categorize than ever. Someone might pick up a luxury serum and a budget hand wash in the same shopping trip, and rightly so expect both to deliver. "Premium used to really just be about price," Joe observes, "but now it's about how a product can make you feel. Formulation is doing a lot of the heavy lifting."

Efficacy, both Charlotte and Joe agree, has shifted from differentiator to baseline expectation. What builds loyalty is now the layer on top: texture, ritual, sensory experience. "Does it feel like a ritual, or is it a chore?" Joe puts it simply.

Multifunctional formats are rising to meet this demand. Consumers still care deeply about their skin, but they just don't want ten steps to show for it anymore. "If you do get it right, you have hero products that do more than one thing. You have a simpler routine, cleaner INCI lists. That's what consumers want," Charlotte says.

Sustainable beauty formulation: The efficiency benefits of solid and waterless formats

Solid and waterless formats are growing fast, driven partly by consumer demand for sustainability and partly by real improvements in performance. Early solid shampoo bars had a reputation for being dry and difficult (as I can personally attest to, having tried a conditioning bar years ago and disliking the feel of it), but modern syndet technology has largely closed that gap. But Charlotte flags a sustainability benefit that rarely makes it into the conversation: the development process itself.

"Fewer versions means less waste from prototypes, less excess materials, less energy in repeated testing. There really is an efficiency benefit that often gets overlooked." 

What this means for brands on Covalo

Stephenson is one of the ingredient suppliers on the Covalo marketplace whose portfolio is built around exactly this kind of flexible, high-performance formulation: bases and ingredients designed to give brands a smarter starting point, whether they're developing everyday essential or premium launches.

Looking to move faster without starting from scratch? Explore Stephenson's full portfolio on Covalo. 

This article is based on Episode 26 of The Beauty Beat Pod. Listen to the full conversation with Charlotte and Joe from Stephenson on your Spotify here.