Meet the Member - Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership

For the second in our new series of CCUK 'Meet the Members' visits, our Director Fraser Bell recently had the opportunity to spend time with the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP) at the University of Edinburgh.

Our Meet the Members initiative allows the CCUK team to better understand member capabilities and ambitions, and explore how we can help create connections, events and collaborations that deliver value both for the individual member and for the wider CCUK network.

Just as importantly, these visits give us an opportunity to gather feedback from members. We want to understand how members view the sector and what members need from CCUK and how, together, we can continue to develop the Cluster as an increasingly connected network and a powerful voice for cosmetics in the UK.

Complex fluids are an important aspect of the cosmetics industry as creams, lotions, emulsions, gels and suspensions are all complex mixtures whose performance depends not simply on the ingredients they contain, but on how those ingredients interact, organise and respond during manufacture, storage and use.

ECFP brings together expertise in soft-matter physics, formulation science, rheology, materials characterisation, processing and skin and hair science to help companies better understand these relationships and their products.

The ECFP is problem-led rather than technique-led. Companies can bring a formulation or processing challenge and the team can draw upon academic expertise, dedicated scientists and advanced experimental capabilities from across the University of Edinburgh to understand why a product behaves as it does and how that understanding might be used to improve it.

For cosmetics and personal care companies, ECFP creates opportunities across areas including formulation stability and microstructure, texture and sensory performance, processing, sustainable reformulation, novel ingredients and interactions between formulations and skin or hair.

This aligns particularly strongly with CCUK's Research & Innovation pillar and our ambition to better connect knowledge, technology and expertise across the UK cosmetics ecosystem.

Our discussions therefore focused not only on ECFP's capabilities, but on how we can make those capabilities more visible and accessible across the CCUK membership. We explored opportunities for knowledge-sharing events, collaborative research and future member visits.

The UK has outstanding scientific, technical and commercial expertise relevant to cosmetics, but that expertise often sits within different organisations, disciplines and networks. One of CCUK's most important roles is helping to make those connections.

A big thank you to the ECFP team for hosting us, sharing their work and, importantly, giving us their thoughts on how we can continue to strengthen CCUK.

We’ll update soon on CCUK and ECFP partner events, and we're already looking forward to our next Meet the Members visit!

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