New Delhi, Jan 21 (IANSlife): Mass produced skincare products are not effective on everyone, are they? If you have been using the same or similar products for many years without seeing results, then it is likely that you are using a mass produced solution that does not suit your skin.

No matter what the product label reads, the ingredients, their concentration and overall formulation matter most for a successful skincare regimen. Your skin's characteristics are unique to you, just like your fingerprints, whether oily, dry, normal or sensitive, only the right products with the right ingredients and formulations can repair damage and restore your skin's texture and smoothness.

Growing consumer awareness is bringing about a change in the product and marketing approach of skincare brands. The one-size-fits-all approach is now passé and most brands are offering some degree of customization, either through 'clean beauty' marketing concepts or through the promise of customized ingredients.

Some brands in the market are disrupting the skin care industry by completely changing the conversation around skin care and carving a new approach of hyper-customization that uses technology and the abundance of data to focus more on the consumer. Mr. Chaitanya Nallan, Co-Founder & CEO of SkinKraft talks about why customization is important.

Hyper-Customization and Co-Created Products

Although customization is not a new mantra, co-created products that use a combination of customer inputs and scientific remedies to create hyper-personalized products, is a market-disrupting concept. For more than a decade now, the skin care industry has consistently fallen short in delivering the promise of glowing and healthy skin.

Customized skin care and co-creation is set to deliver this promise and threatens to make generic skin care obsolete by offering solutions for very specific and personal skin care issues of each user. Technology makes it possible for this super-specialized approach to skin care available for mass audiences. With technology, unique customer information like skin type, problems, lifestyles, environment, geographic location et cetera, make it possible for dermatologists to offer highly individualized remedies.

A report released by Redseer Consulting in 2017 states that the Indian cosmetic industry is expected to grow $20 billion by 2015, with a CAGR of 25 percent. The global cosmetics industry on the other hand is growing at a CAGR of 4.3 percent and is expected to reach $450 billion by 2024.

This means that India will become one of the top five global markets by 2025. A confluence of three significant trends: mass internet adoption enabling feedback loops and user input, Artificial Intelligence enabled understanding of ingredient effectiveness and modern manufacturing technologies will cause a significant shift in the next 5-10 years.

Dermatologists are increasingly seeing customization as the future. They have constantly laid emphasis on the fact that for nearly 2,000 skin disorders, the market is flooded with over 20,000 treatments, yet finding right solution is close to impossible. Just as skin problems are not skin deep, so are their solutions. Customization brought about through technology is a reliable solution that helps find the root problem and approach its treatment holistically.

Over the past few years, customizable products have made their mark in the beauty industry because they offer very specific and real solutions to persistent problems. For years now, women trying to find even basic skincare products are caught up in an unrewarding cycle of experimentation.

Generic formulations catering to the mass market are frustrating to consumers as they are ineffective in solving the problems of complex skin types. Several factors including skin type, skin support systems, pigmentation levels, skin damage levels, hydration levels etc. make an individual's skin unique and therefore the solutions needed are unique too.

Globally, customized beauty products and services have grown 300 percent annually for the last two years and experts believe that growth will remain in triple digits for the next three years. SkinKraft is the only data-driven cosmetic brand in India. Through an online assessment of the customer's skin, similar to a dermatologist's assessment, SkinKraft analyses the customer's current skin condition, the environment and lifestyle factors that will influence treatment and creates a skin profile. Based on this, an algorithm analysis and charts out the problem areas and the ingredients and customized skincare products and regimen, required to tackle the specific skin issues of each individual.