The Potential of Coffee and Olive by Products as Ingredient in Cosmetics Formulations and Their Extraction Techniques

Coffee and olive waste might soon be the secret ingredients in your skincare routine—but first, scientists had to crack the perfect extraction recipe.

Forget exotic berries—the next big thing in cosmetics could come from your kitchen compost. Researchers optimized an ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) method to pull bioactive compounds from Licaria armeniaca tissues, a plant related to coffee and olive byproducts. By tweaking extraction time, solid-liquid ratio, and ethanol percentage, they used a statistical design to find the sweet spots for maximum antioxidant activity and phenolic content.

The best conditions varied by plant part: leaves thrived at 64.88% ethanol for 26 minutes, while thin branches needed 73.81% ethanol for 31 minutes. Thick branches, however, resisted modeling, so the team simply picked the conditions that gave the best observed results. The extracts were then analyzed using advanced mass spectrometry and molecular networking, revealing a chemical treasure trove: alkaloids dominated in all tissues, with amino acids, peptides, and other compounds playing supporting roles.

But the real kicker? These extracts showed potent cytotoxic activity against three cancer cell lines—gastric, brain, and lung—with IC50 values under 50 µg/mL. That means these humble leftovers could one day star in both your moisturizer and your medicine cabinet.

Key Points

• Ultrasound-assisted extraction optimized for Licaria armeniaca.
• Leaves and thin branches had distinct optimal conditions.
• Extracts cytotoxic to cancer cells with IC50 < 50 µg/mL.