How Textures Have Evolved in Personal Care Formulations
We live in an age of micro trends and fleeting fads. With packaging, ingredients, and claims changing with each scroll or swipe, one constant remains: texture matters. It’s the thing consumers reach for, feel, and remember. The thing that, along with fragrance, ensures a consumer returns to buy a product again and again. It’s the thing that makes consumers fall in love with a product at first touch. While textures are constant throughout the skincare industry, they do evolve with the times. Rigid, thick, cold creams have shifted into weightless water gels, whipped mousses, and jelly masks.
The skincare industry continually reinvents textures to meet both functional needs and emotional desires. It’s not enough for a brand to have efficacy, it’s all about the experience of using their product. This evolution has given rise to the “yummy effect”. A trend where skincare mimics the visual and tactile appeal of food, using culinary cues to create cravings. A moisturiser swirled like frosting, or a serum with the bounce of jelly, triggers a visceral response, it’s about creating something that is a psychological shortcut to impulse and pleasure.
Texture Focused Formulation Ingredient Highlights
Our water gel cream, Dew Not Disturb Gel Cream, features Covacryl® MV 60, a versatile rheology modifier from Sensient that delivers a smooth, cushiony texture with excellent stability and a fresh, non-tacky skin feel. It creates that signature bouncy, “aqua-gel” sensory profile that consumers love. Complementing it, Novemer™ EC2 by Lubrizol enhances spreadability and creates a cold process, stable emulsion, ensuring a lightweight yet luxurious glide on application.
In our honey-textured wash, Bee Clean Cleanser, REWOPAL® PEG 6000 DS A MB from Evonik acts as a structuring agent, giving the formula its rich, golden viscosity and smooth flow reminiscent of real honey. Paired with Stepan’s STEPAN-MILD® GCC, a gentle, naturally derived co-surfactant, the formula delivers a creamy, low-foam cleanse that leaves skin feeling soft and conditioned.
The chocolate pudding serum, Holy Choc-Amole Serum, blends Lubrizol’s CARBOPOL® ULTREZ 30 and Evonik’s TEGO® White 50 MB to achieve a silky, pudding-like texture with a soft, cushiony glide. CARBOPOL® ULTREZ 30 delivers rapid thickening, excellent clarity, and a smooth, stable gel network that suspends actives beautifully.
As personal care continues to evolve, texture will remain a powerful driver of consumer perception of your products. The brands that succeed will be those that treat sensory design as a structured, evidence-led part of formulation strategy.
The “yummy effect” is a signal of the increasing sophistication required behind the scenes to deliver products that look, feel and perform exactly as intended.
Mintel (2023), "Beauty and Personal Care Consumer Report"
Statista (2024), "Global Skincare Market Insights"
Euromonitor International (2023), "Sensory Trends in Beauty"
