From speeding up development to discovering new cosmetic ingredients and trends, AI is changing how Chinese beauty products come to market Shortly before China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival last autumn, beauty company Yatsen launched a new serum featuring PDRN, one of skincare’s hottest regenerative ingredients.
What shoppers did not see was how quickly it reached shelves. Yatsen used artificial intelligence to compress a development cycle that typically takes more than two years into just six months, including helping researchers narrow more than 50 ingredient candidates to three in a single week.
China’s beauty industryby shrinking every stage of product development. Local companies are using it to sift through millions of social media posts for emerging trends, discover new cosmetic ingredients with biotechnology partners, and bring products to market in months, rather than years.
As growth slows in the world’s second-largest beauty market, domestic brands are turning to AI to close the innovation gap with global rivals. Mainland companies account for 57 per cent of China’s cosmetics sales, according to the China Association of Fragrance, Flavour and Cosmetic Industries, but still trail foreign brands in the premium segment.
“Western brands currently bring more AI horsepower to discovery and validation,” says Adam Knight, co-founder of Yaso, a platform helping Western beauty brands enter China. “Chinese brands bring more speed from lab to shelf.”
Live streams, e-commerce platforms and social media generate a constant stream of consumer data, allowing brands to quickly identify emerging demand and rapidly feed those insights into product development.