The safety and performance of cosmetic products are among the essential values of Made in France that Cosmetic Valley aims to promote. To this end, the cluster has launched the COSMETOMICS platform network, giving companies in the industry access to cutting-edge technologies and enabling them to participate in the development of new measurement and testing instruments and methods. The challenges are numerous: characterizing the product, studying the skin, measuring skin-product-environment interactions, assessing product safety and their harmlessness for users... Dedicated to Measuring skin-product interactions with the aim of measuring their effectiveness, the first Cosmetomics@Paris-Île-de-France platform was inaugurated in Cergy-Pontoise in 2016. In 2017, the network will be enriched by a second platform: Cosmetomics@Normandie, which will be dedicated to measuring the health and safety of cosmetic products.
Cosmetic product safety: A Strategic Area of Excellence for Cosmetic Valley
Established in Normandy since 2005, the Cosmetic Valley competitiveness cluster shares with the region a strategy of territorial excellence in the field of security. Indeed, a concentration of know-how in this field justifies this thematic positioning for the cluster. The inauguration of the Cosmetomics@Normandie platform is a concrete illustration of this. It follows on from the development, on the Ebroïcien site, of the skills of the academic and private research network on health safety (chemical and microbiological), which originated in the 2000s. Intimately linked to the region's economic development, these skills were identified as part of the smart regional specializations listed by Europe in 2013.
Four new structures have been created to support this process:
▪ Cosmetolab, launched in 2014, the first industrial pilot for preservative-free cosmetics processing and packaging.
▪ Cosmetomics@Normandie, a platform dedicated to measuring the health and safety of cosmetic products.
▪ The I2C Carnot springboard: an academic research network in Normandy, part of whose activity will concern the cosmetics industry (inauguration end of October 2017).
▪ The Centre de Sécurité Sanitaire de Normandie on the Evreux university campus
(opening at the end of 2017)
