Power of sandalwood: Quintis to double down on cosmetics market on the back of antioxidant effectiveness

Quintis Sandalwood is a supplier of Indian and Australian sandalwood raw materials, including oil, powder, logs and chips.

It supplies sandalwood materials to multiple industries for use in fragrance, cosmetics, as well as incense and religious carvings.

The firm owns and manages an Indian sandalwood plantation that spans over 12,000 hectares across northern Australia and is home to more than 5.5 million trees.

Recently, the company has been placing more emphasis on the cosmetics side of the business, believing it could tap into the demand for natural products in the market.

“Initially, as an organisation, we were more focused on perfumery, with sandalwood being a perfume ingredient. But the cosmetic trends nowadays are focusing on natural and going back to essential oils. So that’s where we thought there’s a good opportunity,”​ said Dhanushka Hettiarachchi, PhD, product manager for Quintis Sandalwood.

While sandalwood is best-known as a prized perfumery material, Hettiarachchi highlighted that sandalwood has a long history as a skin treatment, as evidence in Ayurveda texts that have referenced it as early as 200 AD.

“It’s widely used during the summer months, not just on the Indian subcontinent, but in South East Asia. People in Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar apply it on the face for skin protection.”​

Knowing this, the company commissioned a study exploring sandalwood as an active cosmetic ingredient, more specifically, an antioxidant ingredient.

The study found that Indian sandalwood oil could reduce reactive oxygen species around 30% to 40% more than lipophilic antioxidant vitamin E (alpha tocopherol).

The study also found that Indian sandalwood oil was capable of significantly decreasing the damage to collagen in skin tissues caused by stressors such as blue light from solar and digital sources, and pollution from cigarette smoke.

Hettiarachchi told CosmeticsDesign-Asia​ that the validation of sandalwood as an active ingredient was tremendously significant for the company’s ambitions in the cosmetics market.

“There was a time when people were not confident or comfortable with essential oil. ​Now we’ve got this very positive set of data to substantiate what we’ve been saying all these years.”​
The results of the study are very timely for the company, as demand for essential oils and their aromatherapy benefits are increasing with more emphasis on wellness and self-care during the pandemic.

Further studies needed

Moving forward, the company plans to continue its investigation into sandalwood as an active cosmetic ingredient.

“This is our starting point. Even though sandalwood has been studied as a cosmetic and even medicinal ingredient for a long time now, surprisingly, the data is still very rare, so we are thinking of studying sandalwood further,” said Hettiarachchi.

He elaborated that the company plans to conduct more research to clarify the antioxidant mechanism of sandalwood on the skin.

Additionally, it plans to study how it can be applied to a cosmetic formulation, depending on the feedback from its customers.

Source: Cosmetics Journal

https://doi.org/10.3390/cosmetics8020053​

Antioxidant and Anti-Aging Potential of Indian Sandalwood Oil against Environmental Stressors In Vitro and Ex Vivo​

Author: Francois-Newton et al.