Food for the skin: Pola Orbis scores as ‘oral’ skin care product pulls in $264m in first year

The maker of POLA and THREE unveiled Defencera under the Orbis brand in Japan at the start of 2019 and the company expanded its presence in Asia throughout the year with launches in China, Singapore and Taiwan.

Sales grew at a rapid pace and in approximately a year, the company had sold over a million units of Defencera.

The company said the product was instrumental in helping the brand gain new customers.

Additionally, the products went onto win multiple awards, including the top spot under the inner beauty category on @cosme, Japan’s most popular beauty review site.

According to Pola Orbis, Defencera is an oral skin care product that prevents the skin from losing moisture using DF-Ceramides, a purified form of ceramides derived from brown rice.

The Japanese firm said it had spent a decade of research and stringent testing to get Defencera recognised by the Japanese health authorities as a Food for Specified Health Uses (FOSHU).

FOSHU are defined by the authorities as “food containing ingredients with specific functions for health and officially approved to claim its physiological effects on the human body.”​

In order to attain a FOSHU certification, a company must produce clinical studies on the product’s mechanism, prove its safety record with multiple tests on 400 participants and present scientific evidence to back efficacy claims.

Pola Orbis claimed that Defencera is the first of its kind to be certified as a FOSHU.

“Orbis Defencera is the only FOSHU in Japan that has received authorisation from the Consumer Affairs Agency based on a national screening for its scientifically-proven effectiveness and safety for skin,”​ said Marina Ozeki, a representative from Pola Orbis Holdings.

New brand symbol

Due to the success of Defencera, Ozeki told CosmeticsDesign-Asia​ that the company will continue to focus on its potential and reinforce it as a ‘symbol of Orbis’.

The company believes this is only the beginning of the edible skin care trend.

“There are a lot of high-performance cosmetics on the market… but the desire to be more beautiful is still there. For this reason, consumers are going beyond the approach of applying products topically and looking into more holistic methods of care,”​ said Ozeki.

She believes that awareness for edible beauty products like Defencera is rising among consumers as there has been more progress in the field lately.

“As functional research has begun to progress in the fields of beauty and healthcare. I think that attention to beauty foods may have increased,” ​said Ozeki.

She added that the company will continue to focus on research in this area to capitalise on future opportunities.

“We want to explore the possibilities of inner care widely. We will keep up with the latest information on beauty foods from both aspects of customer needs and scientific knowledge,” ​said Ozeki.