Fujifilm poised to become major cosmetic player

According to the company president, Shigetaka Komori, the company will 'F Square i', a series of three functional skin care cosmetics, and 'F Cube i' a series of nine internal care products.

The company says that initially the products will only be sold in Japan through its existing internet and telephone marketing outlet, although there is the scope to expand the lines internationally.

The product lines go on sale in the country on September 28.

The company says that it is responding to increasingly health-conscious consumer demand for sophisticated high quality products that are driving significant growth in the health and beauty category.

This is being backed up by a broad spectrum of core technologies accumulated over years of research and development of photosensitive materials, which can in turn be applied to the health and beauty categories.

The company says that three primary areas of its existing business will be used to help develop the company's health and beauty business - its Formulation Targeting and Delivery (FTD) technology; its research into the control of free radicals; together with its research into collagen.

FTD technology was originally developed for its health care operations as a means of formulating functional ingredients and materials and delivering them to targeted locations. This will aid the development of more products with superior absorption, penetration and stability.

Control of free radicals is something the company has honed in its film-making business, where the technology has been used to preserve photo prints. The company has developed technologies to control free radical generation using vitamin C as a reducing agent.

The most recent step in this areas has come from the discovery that free radicals have been implicated in aging, metabolic syndromes, cancer and other disorders, allowing the company to apply the technology to suppress hazardous free radicals in various products in the health and beauty field, more specifically skin care applications.

As with the control of free radicals, the company has relied on its experience in the film-making arena to apply collagen to its latest business field. This is because film is derived from the same compounds as collagen.

The company has taken its existing research in the field of collagen, previously used in films, and is now working with genetic engineering to reproduce the exact same peptide that is found in human bodies and increasingly used in skin care and pharmaceutical products - an area the company is currently researching.

Ultimately the research in this fields is expected to drive Fujifilm health and beauty sales to ¥1bn ($10m) within the first year.