Living legends: selling skincare with fresh ingredients and live cultures

Our (UK patent pending) Biomic cleanser is a source of naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria derived from prebiotic vegan kefir yoghurt and sweet miso, meaning you can now incorporate fresh skincare with truly live cultures into your routine. Feed your face and reap the benefits of fresh!

Preserving the microbiome, not our products

Here at Lush, we’ve been selling skincare with live cultures for decades. From fresh fruits and vegetables to seaweeds, oats and beans, we chop, juice and squeeze foodstuffs into our products that are a natural source of vitamins, minerals, proteins and enzymes for the skin. Many of them are also a natural source of something else too: microorganisms.

Think about it. When you bite an apple, you take in not only the fibre and flesh of the fruit, rich in vitamins and minerals, but also the microbiota housed inside too. These microorganisms pass through our digestive system giving valuable data to our immune system, while the fibre from the peel nourishes the helpful microorganisms in our gut. Fresh fruit, after all, isn’t sterile, it is full of life and full of nutrients. Working with fresh foodstuffs means that some of our products have a microbial count of their own. It’s part and parcel of working with such fresh ingredients.

Melody Greenwood is a Consultant Microbiologist, former Director of the Food, Water and Environmental Laboratory at Southampton General Hospital Public Health Laboratory and current director of an independent microbiology laboratory that Lush has worked with for over three decades. She explains, “The fresh products such as face masks produced by Lush are made using fresh fruit and vegetable ingredients, many of which are also food items or ingredients in food. These products possess an intrinsic microbial flora, which in the case of edible fruits and vegetables are not expected to cause harm when eaten and swallowed. It follows therefore that they can also be expected to be without harm when applied to the skin. Indeed skin also has its own natural microbial flora which helps to act as a protective shield against the invasion of other organisms. In some food types (such as lettuce), the level of organisms may be as high as 10 million colony forming units per gram without affecting the consumer or the quality of the product.”

We’ve learned to carefully look after these products, ensuring they stay stable and safe to use throughout their entire shelf life.

What are the benefits of live cultures in skincare?

It depends on the type of live cultures inside. Cosmetics should be free of harmful pathogens (and formulators including the Lush inventors work to strict guidelines to comply with this), but, of the many, many microbial species we encounter day to day only about one in a billion is believed to be actively dangerous to humans. The rest are considered benign, even beneficial and we have co-existed for millennia.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that interacting with microbiota in the natural world is important for our immune system. Pioneering work in Finnish daycare centres has found that simple interventions may have powerful effects on our health. Giving children forest floor material to play with enriched their skin microbiota and suppressed the presence of potentially pathogenic bacteria. Now, using a cleanser with live cultures is no substitute for eating fresh foods or getting out in nature, but it demonstrates that cosmetics don’t have to be sterile to be safe, and there are benefits to encountering natural microorganisms in our day to day lives.

What are lactic acid bacteria?

The lactic acid bacteria you’ll find in Biomic cleanser are a diverse group of microorganisms that produce lactic acid as the major product of carbohydrate fermentation. Except for a few species, lactic acid bacteria are non-pathogenic with a generally recognised as safe (GRAS) or food-grade status. Some lactic acid bacteria are used in the manufacture of fermented dairy or vegetable foods such as kefir and are known for their probiotic properties. Just think of those ‘gut-friendly’ yoghurts you buy with live cultures.

Is this product ‘Microbiome-friendly’ or ‘Probiotic’?

‘Microbiome-friendly’ formulas aim to support the skin’s microbiome: the vast network of bacteria, fungi, yeasts and more that inhabit your body from top to toe. Kickstarted by microbial data from your birthing parent, and influenced by your sex, environment, diet and lifestyle, the various invisible lifeforms that make up our microbiome went about their business undetected for millions of years. This was good news really as these commensal microorganisms do a number of essential jobs for us, including protecting us against the more harmful microorganisms we meet, and training our immune system.

Without a clear legal definition around what constitutes a microbiome-friendly cosmetic formula in most markets, it is up to individual companies that make this claim to thoroughly substantiate it with trials and testing. Making big bold claims like probiotic skincare also requires a costly and long-winded clinical trial, which is why you won’t see it on Biomic (just yet).

You may also see products or ingredients described as ‘prebiotic’, meaning they contain ingredients that feed the microbiome, or postbiotic, meaning they contain bits and pieces of sterile bacteria. The delivery of safe, live microorganisms is considered the gold standard, but it’s hard to achieve this in products formulated with preservatives.

Preservatives are recognised antimicrobial ingredients used to restrict all microbial growth in a product (not just recognised pathogens), meaning it is tricky to keep ‘good’ microorganisms alive but eradicate the bad. Preservatives can also enable a business to make larger batches of product and give them a longer shelf life, which is economical (especially if you don’t own your own factories).

However, here at Lush we take a different approach, making small batches, despatching them quickly and selling them with shorter shelf lives (and limited warehouse stays) and monitoring their stability throughout their life. This is what enables us to create a fresh product like Biomic, which sustains live lactic acid bacteria but is free from harmful microorganisms.

Does Lush use preservatives?

Should a preservative be necessary to give our customers a product that’s safe and stable, we will, of course, use one. But it’s not our first port of call and we’ll put in the work to formulate and sell safely and compliantly without them.

For one reason, we throw an awful lot more at our microbiome today than we did even 50 years ago. We may clean, shave, deodorise and apply any number of cosmetic and hygiene products – a large number of which will be formulated with antimicrobial preservatives. 85% of American women said they apply at least 16 products before leaving home – that’s a lot for your microbiome to deal with. With heavily processed and preserved foods known to alter the gut microbiome, our ethos towards skincare has always been to make fresh, handmade products that contain minimal preservative or are self-preserving. After all, you wouldn’t want to eat something that was three years old, so why would you want to put it on your face?

Lush Co-Founder and Product Inventor Helen Ambrosen explains, “Our in-house toxicologist recommends that preservatives are not harmless and it is better if we can avoid them. We also need to remember that a product which does not have an effective preservative system can also be hazardous. So our work continues to create this delicate balance between the microorganisms we live happily with and the control of those that would do us harm.”

How do you ensure ‘live’ products are safe to use?

We’ve learned to carefully look after our fresh products, ensuring they stay stable and safe to use throughout their entire shelf life. Lush Testing Manager Jet Shears leads the team responsible for ensuring the stability of all the products, working to a set of microbiological standards developed in collaboration with Helen and Melody. All testing is performed in real life, in real time and by real people who use the products and return them to us for assessment. “Some cosmetic companies use a form of what they call stability testing,” Jet explains, “where they might put a product in an incubator at a certain temperature for a certain period of time which is meant to then equate to the product’s shelf life. We don't do any of that; we do it in real time.”

Alongside ensuring absolutely no harmful organisms are present at different stages of a product’s shelf life and in use, Jet explains that where it is being applied will also inform the upper limits of what is acceptable when it comes to microbial counts. “You have to consider where and how they are being used,” she says. “If, for example, a product goes around the eyes, we have a very, very stringent upper limit that we work within.”

“We invest a lot of time and work into doing all of the checking and it's very much checking these products in real life, in real time and on real people,” she continues. “It’s thorough, it’s real and it feels right. Customers can be confident in our products and in our procedures because they work.”

So what else is in my product?

Because our fresh face masks contain the freshest ingredients, they offer a good microcosm into the life that lives in some of our products. “The organisms normally found in the fresh products are predominantly Gram positive bacteria [meaning they have a thick, protective cell wall],” explains Melody, “the most common organism being Bacillus species. This group of organisms is very rarely implicated in skin infections or reactions; indeed many of the strains produce antimicrobial products and are used to produce some antibiotics. The other Gram positive organisms found in fresh products are usually very similar to the groups of organisms normally found on the skin,” she continues, “and so are unlikely to cause adverse reactions.” Consider your fresh cosmetics as you would your fresh food, and the concept really isn’t too wild.

So if microorganisms are so great should I stop washing my hands?

Not so fast. While a huge majority of microorganisms we encounter are benign or beneficial, an important distinction here should be drawn between the kinds of microorganisms you encounter when you plant seeds in the garden or eat fresh fruits and vegetables and the to-be-avoided infectious diseases you encounter in the doctors’ waiting room or on public transport. The latter (nasty things like the measles) have only blighted us for a short time and can also be very harmful unless we take protective measures against them, like handwashing and immunisations.* That’s why we keep a careful eye on the microbial counts in our fresh products, ensuring that they are free of the species known to be harmful.

It’s not easy to build an infrastructure around delivering fresh and self-preserving products. But for us, it’s always been worth it. Using a fresh Lush product is like swimming in the sea, not a chlorinated pool. Which would you prefer?

*A growing body of research suggests there is an important distinction to be made between the microorganisms we have co-evolved with over millions of years and the infectious diseases like measles or flu. The latter have only really troubled us for thousands of years since we settled down in larger communities which enabled them to spread more easily. We simply have not co-existed with them for long enough to depend on them for immune regulation.

Find your perfect fresh skincare routine with Lush!

Written by Milly Ahlquist in May 2025.