More Than Skin Deep: Kao develops cutting-edge beauty technology through open innovation
Last November, Kao Corporation unveiled the latest innovations in its lineup, with fine fiber technology capturing the imagination of the market and retweeted over 100 million times.
Since it’s founding in 1887, Kao’s has kept to its mission of “Yoki-Monozukuri” — a commitment by all staff towards customer satisfaction. This policy has proved to work. Recently, they achieved 6-consecutive periods (up until FY2018) of record-high sales revenue plus an increase in dividends for 29-consecutive periods, and they aim to increase their global presence further via their four-year Mid-term Plan, “K20”.
What has changed, though, is a significant shift towards open innovation, where innovative new technologies are worked on together with outside companies.
Kouji Maeda, Chief of Kao’s Research Strategy and Planning Section in their R&D Department, explained to us the rationale behind his company’s move towards open innovation.
“The time has come for us to rethink the business model where monopolized markets are created by keeping out the competition through intellectual property rights, such as patents.”
In addition, to make Kao’s research capabilities even stronger they have also established “value development research”, which connects with “basic technology research” through two-way analysis.
In their “basic technology research”, the sources of technology and unknown phenomena are delved into on a deep level to clarify possibilities for their practical usage. In “value development research”, the way that new raw materials and technology can be applied and made into products is broadly pursued while simultaneously considering the needs of consumers.
One example of their activities is the organization of feedback from consumers into a database that is made freely available to the researchers.
Out of the hundreds of innovations that have resulted, five were chosen to be presented at their Technology Innovation Information Session in November 2018. Here is a look at some of them.
Fine fiber technology — skin that transcends skin
Out of the announced technologies, fine fiber has received an especially high level of attention and has led to a response of over 100 million retweets. It’s virtually a second skin — a membrane that clings precisely to the skin and is seemingly invisible.
A polymer solution loaded inside a small custom applicator is squirted directly onto skin at a speed of 120 km per second and in the form of a superfine fiber of diameter around 0.5 micrometers. Through this process, a layered, extremely thin membrane is formed on the surface of the skin. It has an outstanding ability to not just uniformly even itself out smoothly over the skin surface, but also allow for ventilation, moisture permeability and intimacy with the skin. It can firmly keep in cosmetic substances between the fibers while allowing the skin to breathe. It also becomes thinner at the edges making the edges blend in with the skin and giving it the advantage of being harder to come off.
Fine fiber uses a technique called “electrospinning” to squirt positively charged polymer solution onto the negatively charged skin with great force and spin a super fine thread. After the announcement, Kao received many inquiries from the medical field. A variety of different usages are also begin considered in the fields of skincare, makeup, and therapy, and they are aiming for practical application of the technology within this year.
Bio IOS
Oil-based ingredients with 12 to 14 carbon atoms are the surfactant ingredients that are the cleaning components of most detergents. However, they only make up a tiny 5% of the total oil-based ingredients in the world, and the reality is that such scarce supplies are being competed for by manufacturers. With the threat of demand fast outstripping supply, Kao developed Bio IOS, where solid fats with long carbon chains — the residue pressed out when edible palm oil is extracted from the fruit of oil palm-are changed into components suitable for use in cleaning products.
Surfactants are a type of molecule that has both a lipophilic group that has a high affinity with oil and a hydrophilic group that has a high affinity with water. However, Bio IOS has a special structure that has a hydrophilic group in the middle of the long lipophilic group, allowing it to demonstrate a high affinity with both water and oil, plus it can dissolve well in water of low temperature and high mineral content. It has been put to practical use as the main cleaning component in Kao’s Attack ZERO concentrated liquid laundry detergent and went on the market from April 1st this year.
RNA monitoring
RNA monitoring is a technology where 13,000 types of ribonucleic acid (RNA*) from facial sebum are isolated and examined. It’s understood that RNA is deeply linked to hormone concentration in blood and the internal state of the body, and so can help to discover diseases such as atopic dermatitis without having to rely on subjective symptoms and also give skincare suggestions in accordance with the condition your skin is in on a particular day. It also has the potential to play a role in health examinations as preventive medicine. Currently, Kao is undertaking a collaborative project where the relationship between diseases and RNA is being studied.
Along with these, the technology that turns the color of hair into a natural-looking black by adding melanin pigment is already being adopted for grey-haircare product “Rerise”, and “rainbow dye”, for coloring hair so that looks a different color depending on the light, has been developed together with Fujifilm Corporation. In addition, Kao is investigating a type of shampoo that can change the color of your hair through daily washing.
*RNA: Ribonucleic acid. It can act as a sample of the state of a person’s health due to the way it changes depending on the state of the living body. However it is unstable and easily breaks, and so far it has been difficult to extract and analyze like DNA.
