Botanical extracts

Abstract

The existence of the word “cosmeceuticals” is very much linked to the U.S. FDA definition of drugs and cosmetics in the 1938 FD&C Act. One can only speculate as to why 60 years of scientific knowledge and research have been ignored by the FDA in not revising the definition! The European Commission has been wiser and its 1976 definition of cosmetics was modified in 1993 to acknowledge the fact that everything put on the skin or hair may have a physiological effect (1). It puts the responsibility on the industry to ascertain product safety and efficacy (claims justification) (2). Natural extracts, whether from animal, botanical, or mineral origin, have been used as “active ingredients” of drugs or cosmetics for as long as human history can go. Oils, butter, honey, beeswax, lead, and lemon juice were common ingredients of the beauty recipes from ancient Egypt. Many botanical extracts are used today in traditional medicine and large pharmaceutical companies are rediscovering them. The major differences between the drug and the cosmetic approach rely on the intent (i.e., “cure or prevention of a disease” vs. “beautifying”) as well as how the extract is considered. In the cosmetic industry, the botanical extract is the active ingredient. It may contain hundreds of chemical structures and it has a proven activity. In the drug industry, you need to know the chemical structure of the active ingredient within the extract, very often to synthesize it, to purify it, sometimes to discover that isolation and purification leads to a loss in the biological activity, or to realize that, despite all the skills of organic chemists, nature is not easy to reproduce.