The modern cosmetic industry, known for being fast-paced and science & innovation-led, requires constantly meeting the ever-changing consumer demand for effective and pleasant products.

In such an environment, formulators face significant challenges in choosing the best actives, creating hundreds of prototypes, swerving around regulatory restrictions and bans, battling bad press affecting perfectly safe and efficacious ingredients, solving stability issues, decreasing bulk cost, and much more.

Therefore, it is crucial to be able to rely on instrumental techniques to investigate microscopic characteristics & behaviours of ingredients and formulations under development and translate the data generated into macroscopic properties.

In the Authors’ opinion, such an approach, by coupling instrumental techniques with the indispensable formulator’s expertise, is essential to optimise product performance, ultimately leading to increased consumer satisfaction.

This review aims to give the reader an overview of some of the most suitable instrumental techniques that can assist and complement the formulation process.