Bold red lipstick gets its color from crushed bugs. This biotech startup made a version that’s insect-free

The intense red color of classic lipstick traditionally comes from an unlikely source: crushed bugs that live on cactus plants in South America. It takes tens of thousands of the ground-up insects to make just a pound of the vivid red dye.

The red coloring, called carmine, also shows up in food—from red velvet cupcakes to sausages, gummy candies, and some versions of strawberry yogurt. In the cosmetics industry, major brands started moving away from carmine in the 2010s because of ethical concerns. A growing number of consumers wanted vegan makeup. (Crushing bugs also creates an allergen because of other bug parts that end up in the dye.) But because synthetic dyes don’t perform as well, carmine is still found in some high-end products, from shades of MAC lipstick and NARS blush to Chanel nail polish.

Now, a biotech startup called Debut has developed a new alternative: an exact replica of carmine that’s made from fermentation rather than bugs.

The molecule was incredibly difficult to replicate. “It’s a really unique color . . . it’s a very complicated [chemical] structure,” says Joshua Britton, Debut’s CEO and founder. Academic scientists took 15 years to understand it, he says, “and it took us three to four years to work out how to make it.” The company discovered two new classes of enzymes that were the missing pieces of the manufacturing process, and found a way to keep the cost of the whole system relatively affordable. The resulting product is the same as the original color, minus the allergen and gross-out factor.

There’s strong demand for a product like this in the beauty industry. Carmine is a “perfect ingredient,” Britton says. It’s stable when it interacts with other ingredients, long-lasting, and vibrant in a way that other dyes aren’t.

When Spanish explorers arrived in South America in the 1500s, carmine quickly became a major trade item. In Europe, red dye was difficult and expensive to make, and red clothing was mostly reserved for royalty (or, say, the Pope). In Peru, carmine had been used to dye fabric for at least two centuries, and the explorers realized that it far outperformed European dyes. Carmine started to show up in everything from oil paintings to British military uniforms. By the late 19th century, as the cosmetics industry was scaling up, carmine was a natural choice of ingredient for red, pink, and peach products.

Right now, making the biotech version costs more than standard carmine, unsurprisingly. “The traditional bug version is at the moment cheaper, and that’s because there are 70,000 bugs hand picked off the leaf of a cactus dissolved in acid, and that’s the process,” says Britton. But the new tech is still at a pilot stage, and the company is now working with a larger company to scale up production and bring the cost down. Fermenting the product is also far more efficient than extracting it from bugs. “We typically don’t invest in molecules where we don’t think we can get down to cost parity,” he says.

The cosmetics industry is a good initial fit, he says, since only small amounts of color are needed. (A pound of Debut’s carmine could color 6,500 tubes of lipstick.) The company is already working with a handful of beauty brands in its labs to develop new formulations for products.

The food and pharmaceutical industries, which are also looking for alternatives to carmine, will come next, after the company works with the Food and Drug Administration for approvals and to figure out how the product will be labeled. Another factor is helping drive demand: the FDA recently banned Red No. 3, a common food dye, because of potential health risks. Food brands will have to phase out that dye over the next two years—and biotech carmine could be a viable choice.

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