Biofuels to anti-age your face. Seriously.

Biofuels for your face will be on sale soon.

Well, that’s the gist of it, anyway. The story: Algae biofuels company Solazyme has formulated a skincare line called Algenist using “anti-aging breakthrough ingredient alguronic acid” that will go on sale this spring in eight countries, via makeup shop Sephora and TV shopping company QVC. The skincare products use Solazyme’s technology and research on microalgae strains, through which the company discovered alguronic acid.

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Yeesh. Maybe we should just stop calling them biofuels companies. Though regarded as one of the more advanced biofuels startups, Solazyme refers to itself as a “renewable oils and bioproducts company.”

And, as we’ve reported in the past, biofuels startups have increasingly become less about biofuels and more about products that can be made with biofuels technology.

Solazyme is one of the most active startups out there on this front, having inked deals with everyone from global consumer goods titan Unilever to food ingredient specialist Roquette Freres. LS9 also has a deal with Procter & Gamble. Aurora Algae changed its name from Aurora Biofuels last year to indicate its new focus on producing food and lotion ingredients. Renewable chemicals startup Genomatica recently raised $45 million.

The anti-aging skincare line is especially unusual in that Solazyme has chosen to launch its own brand and line of products, staking a claim in the beauty sector, which is already crowded with hundreds of products and names. In the past, the company (and others) have mostly done research agreements or joint ventures and used their technology to provide ingredients for a finished product, rather than offer and market the finished product itself.

Solazyme has signed on strong partners in the past, and Sephora and QVC — which also market Algenist — certainly follow that trend, even if they are two companies I never thought would be in the same sentence as “biofuels.”

Lame jokes about “renewables” aside, you can hardly blame biofuels companies for looking for new and creative ways to leverage their technology. Making biofuels is an expensive business, and what’s promising in the lab is rarely if ever easy to push to the million-gallon manufacturing scale. And with the chemicals, consumer goods and beauty markets looking so lucrative, biofuels companies arguably should be looking to diversify their revenue streams by making offerings in those areas.

Running across a Solazyme-branded product at the mall was definitely not a story I thought I’d be covering this year. Still, it can’t be any worse than Botox, right, guys? And if slathering on a serum that originated in a biofuels lab helps erase fine lines and wrinkles, then it’s just one more win for cleantech, however unexpected.

[Top image via Flickr/sunshinecity; bottom image via Treehugger]

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