Bonjour,

The great advantage of speaking at science congresses is that is get to mingle with the top of the crop in the microbiome space. This is how we met the people of LabSkin, and how we went to prove scientifically that Gallinée products were microbiome-friendly.

  • Who are LabSkin: They are a science lab specialised in human skin models. They are based in England but most of the team has a lovely Irish accent.
  • What does it mean? They manage to grow in a lab a fully formed human skin, with dermis, epidermis, sebum, the whole thing. They can grow you normal skin, scalp, skin exposed to sun, skin with eczema… They worked at it for 20 years and published a number of science articles on the technology. Lately they went a step further and started to add a little microbiome on their lab skin. It’s all incredibly innovative.
  • Why is it so cool? For me it’s amazing for two reasons:
      • It totally bypasses the need for any animal testing. You can measure irritation of human skin with no animal or volunteers suffering at all. How cool is that?
      • And of course why we’re here: You can now test beauty products to see their effect on the skin microbiome! 🎉

But wait, it’s been done before, hasn’t it?

Yes and no. You see, the problem with the microbiome is that it’s different for everyone, and it’s a very new science. So, testing methods are evolving all the time. The few certifications existing so far are made using bacteria grown in petri dishes, feeding from sugar. It’s very different from normal skin conditions, so a bit far from reality for us.

So what did we test exactly? LabSkin grew some little skin patches (they are around 1cm square), of a normal skin, a normal scalp and an eczema skin. They applied their mini-microbiome on it, and leave it for some time so that the bacteria get comfortable and start feeling at home. Then they applied a Gallinée product, waited a bit more, and collected the whole lot. They measure the bacteria before, the bacteria after, and how the skin was reacting to all this. If there was no significant changes to the makeup of bacteria, the product was microbiome-friendly. If there was changes in the right directions (in case of acne for example), the product was microbiome-rebalancing. We don’t know what happens if there is a negative change, because all our test results were good!

Here are the results, product by product.

So you’ll see this cool little logo a lot from now on, because we are very proud of these results!