Inulin
Cichorium intybus (chicory root) · INCI Inulin
Most skincare ingredients act on your skin. Inulin does not. It is food, and the things it feeds are the microbes already living on you. That shift, from treating the skin to feeding what lives on it, is the idea the whole range is built around.
It does not act on your skin. It acts on the microbes living there, which is a different and more interesting idea.
What it is
Inulin is a plant fibre, a chain of fructose units, drawn from chicory root. You may know it from nutrition, where it is the fibre that feeds helpful gut bacteria. The skin works on a similar principle, and inulin does a similar job there.
The mechanism is neat. Your skin's helpful residents, Staphylococcus epidermidis and others like it, carry the enzymes to break inulin down and use it as food. Several less welcome species largely do not. So adding inulin is less like intervening and more like laying on a meal that only some of the guests can eat. Feed the ones you want, and they grow, and hold their ground against the ones you do not. That is what "support, not control" means in practice, and inulin is where the idea is most literal.
What it does in our formulas
Two things, and the first is the reason the range exists.
It feeds the microbes you want
Inulin is a chain of fructose units, a plant fibre. Your skin's helpful residents, Staphylococcus epidermidis among them, can break it down and use it. Several unwanted species largely cannot. The research shows this selective feeding in the laboratory: give the commensals a food source their competitors cannot eat, and you tilt the balance in their favour.
Emerging evidenceIt holds a little water
A secondary and more ordinary benefit. Inulin is a mild humectant, so it draws a little water into the skin's surface alongside its main job.
Well characterisedWhat the research does not show
Microbiome skincare is a field where the marketing has run some way ahead of the evidence, and we are not going to pretend our own prebiotic is above that.
Marketed as Clinically proven to rebalance your skin microbiome
Marketed as A probiotic
So we describe the mechanism, which is real and well characterised in the laboratory, and we stop short of promising an outcome nobody has yet demonstrated on human skin. It is a good idea with good foundations, and that is worth saying without overstating it.
On the label and in the range
Inulin appears in every one of our formulations, toward the end of the ingredient list, which is where you would expect a prebiotic used at a low level. On the label it reads simply as Inulin. The exact percentage is published on each product page.
Is it suitable for me?
Inulin is a plant fibre with an excellent safety record, well tolerated on sensitive skin, and suitable for a vegan routine. It carries no restrictions under UK or EU cosmetic law. Being food for microbes rather than an active on the skin, it is about as gentle an ingredient as we use.
As with anything new, if your skin reacts easily it is worth patch testing first.
The research behind this page
We review the published literature. We do not conduct the studies below.
- Chen Y, et al. Prebiotic Oligosaccharides in Skin Health: Benefits, Mechanisms, and Cosmetic Applications. Antioxidants 2025;14(6):754. "https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox14060754", "url"=>"https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox14060754"}" rel="nofollow">→
- Yu J, et al. The Skin Microbiome Revolution: The Science and Challenges of Prebiotics, Probiotics, and Postbiotics in Skincare. Cosmetics 2026;13(1):43. "https://doi.org/10.3390/cosmetics13010043", "url"=>"https://doi.org/10.3390/cosmetics13010043"}" rel="nofollow">→
- Topical Prebiotics and Microbiome Metabolites: A Systematic Review of the Effects of Altering the Skin Microbiome in Atopic Dermatitis. J Integr Dermatol 2025. "https://jintegrativederm.org/doi/10.64550/joid.d9xw9z64", "url"=>"https://jintegrativederm.org/doi/10.64550/joid.d9xw9z64"}" rel="nofollow">→