The purpose of this thesis is to study the penetration of cosmetics actives into the skin. The main lines of investigation concerned the influence of actives and formulation components physicochemical properties on the penetration mechanisms. The selected cosmetic actives are retinol, lipophilic, and caffeine, hydrophilic. The investigated formulations are oil in water emulsions, compared to their corresponding surfactant solutions. Three cosmetic oils were used: Butylene glycol cocoate, Octyldodecyl myristate and liquid paraffin. Emulsions are stabilized with polyethylene glycol ester surfactants (PEG20 and PEG6) having variable carbon chain lengths (C8, C12, C18 and C18: 1). Percutaneous penetration was measured quantitatively using Franz diffusion cells in a static and dynamic way and qualitatively by confocal Raman microscopy. With this combination of analytical techniques, it is possible to measure the penetration and evaluate the impact of each formulation component on skin penetration of an active. A correlation could be established between the fluidizing effect of an oil and the increase in retinol penetration. Moreover, the surfactants, although they showed less effect in terms of fluidizing also lead to an increase in penetration due to a variation of the active partition coefficient between the formula and the skin. Regarding caffeine, the influence of the surfactant structure and in particular the carbon chain length has been pointed out
