REVIEW article
Front. Bacteriol.
Sec. One Health in Bacteriology
This article is part of the Research TopicBacteria Beyond Borders: Innovations in Industrial BiotechnologyView all articles
Bacterial Pigments as Sustainable and Functional Colorants in Cosmetic Applications: Advances and Prospects
Provisionally accepted
- 1JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), Bengaluru, India
- 2Department of Biotechnology, Chandigarh College of Technology, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, India
- 3Postgraduate and Research Department of Zoology, Maharaja's College Ernakulam, Ernakulam, India
- 4Department of Biotechnology, Mar Athanasius College, Kothamangalam, India
- 5SIMATS Deemed University Saveetha Medical College and Hospital, Chennai, India
- 6Department of General Surgery, Saveetha Medical College & Hospital, Chennai, India
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Bacterial world is a promising source for the production of coloured metabolites known as bacterial pigments. The synthetic dyes are responsible for health problems such as allergies, cancer, toxicity and hyperactivity, and environmental issues such as pollution of waterways, disruption in aquatic ecosystems, inhibition of photosynthesis, and bioaccumulate in food chains. These concerns have provided the chance to microbial world for being used as source of natural pigment for industrial applications including cosmetics. Cosmetic products such as lipsticks, nail polishes, hair dyes, soaps, bodywash, facewash, creams and lotions utilize various coloured compounds of chemical origin, any may pose adverse effects on their unregulated or overuse. Bacterial pigments can be alternate and sustainable option to replace these chemical moieties in these cosmetic products. Bacteria from diverse habitats with broad scale of colours such as carotenoids, prodigiosin, melanin, violaceins, quinones, indigoidines etc. has been reported for the beneficial properties such as colour, antioxidant, emulsifying, anti-aging and UV-protection. These pigments have multiple shades and also possess nutritional and therapeutic properties. Although most of information in this field is based on primary research at laboratory scale and very limited attempts has been made in improving these bacterial strains and process for improving the pigment production. Hence, it shows a scope for the research and innovations in this field. The integration of advanced genetic and metabolic engineering technology such as CRISPR/cas along with utilization artificial intelligence and machine learning based methods can transform this field and boost the pigment production. Therefore, current review article aims to provide and state of art information on bacterial pigments with the possibility to their application in the cosmetic products. Furthermore, the current review article also highlights the existing challenges and outlines future research directions.
Keywords: Bacterial pigments, chemical toxicity, Cosmetics, Natural colours, Sustainable source
Received: 14 Nov 2025; Accepted: 13 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Chakraborty, Kaur, Thazeem, THOMAS, S and Sharma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Deepak Sharma
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