What Does Cosmetic Product Development Actually Involve, and How Long Does It Take?

Short answer: Development moves through three stages — discover, test, create — and the overall timeline depends on which stages your project actually needs. A project starting from an already-chosen, well-characterised active can move to formulation quickly. A project starting from an open discovery search, or requiring bespoke assay development, takes longer because each additional stage of evidence-gathering adds real laboratory time that cannot be compressed.

What happens at each stage

Discover narrows a wide field of candidate ingredients down to a shortlist worth testing, using AI-guided screening of ingredient, biological and literature data.

Test validates the shortlisted ingredient or formulation in laboratory assays — this is where a candidate either earns its claim or gets ruled out.

Create turns a validated active into a stable, compatible, manufacturable formulation.

How Hexis Lab approaches this

Because Hexis Lab runs discovery, testing and formulation on one platform and one team, projects avoid the delay of handing data between separate suppliers at each stage — the evidence generated in testing feeds directly into formulation decisions rather than being re-interpreted by a new team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I speed up development by skipping straight to formulation?

You can if you already have a validated, well-characterised active ingredient. Skipping testing entirely is not recommended if you intend to make a specific efficacy claim.

What is the slowest stage of development?

Open-ended ingredient discovery and any testing that requires a bespoke, newly designed assay typically take the longest, since both involve original scientific work rather than applying an established method.