Meet Jasmina Aganovic of Arcaea

Jasmina Aganovic is a cosmetics industry professional who is driving innovation in beauty. As the CEO of Arcaea, she leverages the power of expressive biology to create a new wave of beauty products that provide consumers with innovative and sustainably sourced ingredients. Prior to launching Arcaea, she was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Gingko Bioworks and the President of Mother Dirt, a skin microbiome brand that developed the first live probiotic and biome-friendly products for the skin. Jasmina has a degree in chemical and biological engineering from MIT.

Q: Your work at Arcaea is driving and shaping the future of beauty. Can you tell us how it is paving the way for new innovation? What is your mission?

A: Our mission is to make biology necessary and desired in beauty. We view biology as a creative tool that can expand upon the existing palette of ingredients and enable new functionality in product experiences. When the industry is no longer constrained by existing sourcing methods.

Biology is capable of things chemistry alone cannot do. A greater understanding of biology can enable new possibilities for beauty, simply because biology focuses on the study of living organisms, the foundation of much of what we see around us. It can do things modern technologies cannot—such as self-replicate and self-repair. Because of these amazing qualities, we’ve seen many new technologies to understand and leverage biology in the last few decades.  

Specific examples of technologies focused on biology include DNA sequencing (to understand the human genome and the microbiome), bioinformatics (to understand massive amounts of biological data at scale), and biological engineering (to create life-saving drugs like insulin). All of these are driven by the need for novel solutions to the challenges we collectively face. 

In recent years, these technologies have scaled to be more accessible to markets beyond pharma and academic research. Applying these advanced technologies to beauty will enable entirely new possibilities while also reducing our reliance on unsustainable sourcing practices.

Q: Terms like ‘green cosmetics’ and ‘biotech beauty’ are still loosely defined in the industry. Are they the same thing? How do you define biotech in the context of beauty? 

A: They are not the same thing. Green cosmetics generally refer to products that are intended to be more sustainable or natural. The term is not regulated, so it can mean a variety of things. 

Biotech beauty refers to the use of microbes as a way to make ingredients. Basically, microbes (not industrial chemical plants) “manufacture” ingredients. Biology is a preferred method because it does not rely on extracting rare and finite ingredients from the environment. 

We also have to be careful when using the word “biotech.” The industry is taking anything biological and just calling it “biotech,” even if companies or products are not using a microbe to source ingredients. Because biotech beauty is highly sustainable, it is often called “green” too. The terms are not mutually exclusive, but they are often misapplied. 

Q: Can you give us insight into the various technologies you’re leveraging at Arcaea and any theoretical examples of how they’re applied? 

A: Yes, Arcaea is taking all the technologies that have emerged over the  last 20 years to understand and harness biology. We aggregate them and direct its impact towards the beauty and personal care industry. 

Biotech is incredibly promising, both in terms of its potential for more sustainable options along with new efficacy it could unlock. 

At a company called Synlogic, researchers are developing what they call "living medicines"—they take bacteria that normally lives in the gut, and then engineer them to execute functions that can treat diseases. 

Allonia is working on waste remediation. Essentially, they are engineering bacteria that can eat PFOAs, i.e. forever chemicals that plague our natural environment.

‍At Arcaea, we're looking at keratin proteins in hair care. Right now, what you see in the beauty industry is keratin that is extracted from sheep’s wool. And what’s in there is a grab-bag of protein from the wool—it’s not highly specific and, as a result, has limited performance. However, with biotech, we can design a specific keratin that might have a very targeted performance attribute within the hair (whether repair, shine, or shape). When we identify those, we can produce an entire range of keratins that are not only sustainable, but deliver performance benefits that go beyond what is possible today.

Q: Does biotech beauty offer a more sustainable way forward? What are the challenges that exist (e.g. creating ingredients through genetically modified organisms)?

A: Biotechnology requires a significantly smaller land, water, and energy footprint by many orders of magnitude, but there are still considerations. Fundamentally, biotechnology involves growing ingredients and materials, rather than extracting them from nature. Growing is significantly better for the planet. Within the lab, biotech methods are typically more sustainable than chemical methods, but it’s important to understand the nuance. 

Another reason Biotech’s footprint is significantly smaller than industrial chemistry is because we bake sustainability into our design process. For example, microbes need to eat too. Some microbes eat sugar or molasses, and others eat carbon dioxide. The hope is that the technology will evolve to the point where we can run hyper-efficient fermentations using sunlight, air, CO2 or waste biomass. Beyond feedstock, the process must go through a lifecycle analysis to assess further opportunities for sustainability. 

Overall, with biotech processes, you get away with using few to zero harsh chemicals, so it's typically much safer. Most often, it's also less energy intensive; for many chemical processes you need extreme pressure or extreme temperatures to force the reaction to occur, and typically this is not one-and-done, so you are repeating this process many times to get the purity or consistency needed for an ingredient. This is usually very energy intensive. This type of energy output is not required for most biotech ingredients. 

Q: Based on your prior experience at AoBiome and Motherdirt, you have done a lot of work in the area of the skin microbiome. There are mixed opinions around the microbiome between truly functional cosmetics vs just a cyclical marketing story. Will the microbiome trend stick or will it phase out, and why?

A: Definitely. My experience at Mother Dirt showed me not only how powerful biology is, but also how few tools there are in the industry to actually work with and harness it. I believe this lack of tools is preventing the microbiome from fundamentally transforming the industry. 

Understanding how to harness microbes requires a knowledge that is deeply rooted in biology. While it might seem like a small shift for the industry, it is actually much more complicated. The inclination has been to find ways to retrofit biology rather than to fully explore its capacity to solve problems and deliver new types of product experiences. 

Q: Your journey in the beauty industry is very inspirational and many would love to follow your path. What advice would you offer current or future entrepreneurs that you didn’t learn in school?

A: Focus on what you can learn in every stage or situation. It will serve you well because any entrepreneurial journey is about leadership through ambiguity. 

Q: What skincare brands/products do you love and why?

A: I use different products and brands for different reasons. I will always have a special place in my heart for brands I worked on directly: Anything from the Fresh Sugar line of products (one of my first jobs); anything from the Living Proof No Frizz and Full line (I actually pitched those products on QVC!); as well as the Mother Dirt AO+ Mist (Their hero product). 

Q: What is the one beauty trend you hope will cease to exist in 2022? And the one you hope will flourish?

A: Cease: Some of the DIY at home beauty treatments. If not done under the supervision of a medical or aesthetics professional, they can be really dangerous and harmful for your skin.  

Flourish: I hope to see more communication around the scientific aspects of self care and beauty; and content creators digging into the science and nuance of products and their performance. The public deserves to better understand how their favorite products are made.