Premium Beauty News - What are Fiabila’s main innovations this year?
Alexandre Miasnik - Paradoxically, as consumers increasingly seek purity, naturalness, and safety, “gel” or “semi-permanent” nail polish is getting ever-more popular in most countries. The problem is that these products are loaded with monomers, which means they are harmful and comply neither with cosmetics regulations nor with most brands’ blacklists widely acknowledged on the nail polish market. Their occlusive nail films lead to a risk of allergies and damage for users, as well as a risk of skin or respiratory reactions for manicures.
At Fiabila, developing alternative formulas using safe raw materials has been at the core of our R&D strategy for many years. As a result, we have put an emphasis on the development of UV-reactive techniques to exclude monomers, and we now offer two product ranges: Sun Prodigy, which reacts to natural UV rays and can be used at home, and Salon Prodigy, which is more professional, since it is applied under a LED lamp. Both can easily last up to 15 days and can be removed at home without difficulty.
Meanwhile, we keep upgrading “conventional” formulas to achieve a high performance level, at least taking into account the current situation in terms of research and raw materials available.
Premium Beauty News - It seems nail care is getting much stronger. Is it a key growth path for Fiabila?
Alexandre Miasnik - Nail care is essential. All women or almost are concerned with breaking, weakened, or dry nails.
The use of gels makes things worse, especially since, to cover bad-looking nails after application, most women conceal them with another application, which deprives nails of oxygen for weeks and alters their condition. The fact that salons closed during lockdown, preventing products from being removed, further compounded the problem.
There is a high demand for strengthening nail care products, so we developed comprehensive ranges of products intended to repair and nourish nails, in particular by adding natural actives, vitamins, vegetable oils, and fruit extracts. Although these products are cosmetics, not drugs, we guarantee their efficacy with systematic tests on consumer panels.
Also, to make our ranges more appealing, since they are often transparent among other products, we have coloured them, and even slightly perfumed a few for more pleasure of use, in particular to seduce younger consumers.
Premium Beauty News - Has the notion of naturalness further evolved on the nail polish segment?
Alexandre Miasnik - Naturalness is a notion that is getting lost among many others: organic, biosourced, clean, vegan, etc. In fact, consumers, and sometimes even brands, are often lost – or misled. For example, organic semi-permanent nail polish can be harmful, because it still contains allergenic raw materials.
When it comes to nail polish, naturalness usually means previously petroleum-based raw materials are replaced by products derived from farming which offer exactly the same performance. It is a significant step forward: today, most range launches involve products of natural origin.
Premium Beauty News - Many conventional brands claim their products are partly natural. What do you think about this?
Alexandre Miasnik - What matters most is consumer safety. European cosmetics regulations and many others largely contributed to removing harmful substances from the market, and that’s all the better. At Fiabila, the search for increasingly pure ingredients led us to contribute to developing raw materials of natural origin for our formulas.
Premium Beauty News - What about manufacturing processes? Do brands take them into account when developing clean formulas?
Alexandre Miasnik - It is a key issue – our customers’ requirements in this field are extreme. Nail polish is a highly technical product; manufacturing requires much know-how. There is a double challenge: using a process which complies with specifications, while providing the performance required and, more recently, complying with very demanding manufacturing standards.
At Fiabila, we have fitted our three main sites in France, the USA, and Brazil, with fully automated systems for manufacturing suspension bases, and we are the only ones to have this equipment. As a result, we deliver products with incredible quality consistency, we avoid contamination risks, and we minimize polluting emissions.
Premium Beauty News - It seems the global nail polish market has taken advantage of the different lockdown periods. Can you confirm that?
Alexandre Miasnik - Women never ceased wearing makeup; they kept buying products. But things do vary from one geographic region to another. In any case, obviously, many women who were used to going to salons applied their own nail polish themselves at home!
