Nuxe Group Managing Director Muriel Koch signed the €834,000 partnership with Thomas Kallstenius, CEO of LIST. (Photo: Guy Wolff/Maison Moderne)

Nuxe Group Managing Director Muriel Koch signed the €834,000 partnership with Thomas Kallstenius, CEO of LIST. (Photo: Guy Wolff/Maison Moderne)

LIST and French cosmetics giant Nuxe signed a partnership on Thursday 21 October to develop new active ingredients that could be found in the creams and products of the maker of the famous Huile Prodigieuse.

The partnership between  (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) and Nuxe, the French natural cosmetics giant Nuxe, signed on Thursday, is unprecedented in many ways.

"This is the first collaboration in the field of cosmetics for LIST,” explained Damien Lenoble, director of the Materials Research & Technology (MRT) department. For Nuxe, this alliance with a foreign laboratory is also a first, as until now its 40 patents had been developed in-house, in its laboratory located in the Paris region.

"There is a complementary expertise between List's materials science and Nuxe's knowledge of natural products and their skin applications," summarised Eve Merinville, director of research and foresight, at the Société de Recherche Cosmétique, a subsidiary of the Nuxe Group established in Luxembourg since 2012.

This company currently employs four people and is in charge of the intellectual property of Nuxe. Its latest financial year shows a profit of €4.47m for 2019, after a loss of €775,860 published a year earlier.

Green chemistry in the spotlight

The collaborative project which was named Biomico represents a total investment of €834,000 according to LIST's CEO . "This project demonstrates the attractiveness of Luxembourg as a research and innovation hub," he added.

The two partners aim to develop a new, innovative, safe and effective biosourced active ingredient carrier for natural cosmetic products and as an alternative to existing, classical vectorisations such as liposomes. In the laboratory, this translates into the absence of solvents and nanoparticles, demonstrated Jean-Sébastien Thomann, Senior Researcher & Technology Associate. The scientist is preparing, with his team, to develop solutions that could, in four to six years, lead to a sustainable cosmetic ingredient that will be part of the French group's range.

"This type of innovation can lead to new products," said Muriel Koch, CEO of Nuxe Group. While she acknowledged that her company had until now been tied to its own research infrastructure, she welcomed the expertise of LIST, whose "researchers can help our Paris team with the tricky aspects of product development.”

LIST's Materials Research and Technology (MRT) department houses 125 research and innovation projects with more than 200 employees. For its part, Nuxe has been active in natural cosmetics for more than 30 years. Its best-known product is the Huile Prodigieuse, one of the best sold oils in pharmacies. The brand claims that a bottle of this product is sold every 11 seconds worldwide.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.