Inclusivity

Overview

Our team strongly values the inclusivity in our work. We believe that the main issue which we solve in our project - safe cosmetics usage - is related to everyone, regardless of their age, ethnicity, presence of any disabilities or social and economic background.

Our main priority is to make sure that our work reaches and helps a wide range of people, even beyond our country.

Multilingualism And The Book

We have developed an educational children's book that teaches skin health, self-care, and the safe use of cosmetics through storytelling. The goal of this project was to make science and health education accessible and engaging for children aged 6–11.

You can read more about our book on the Education page.

Braille

To make our book even more accessible, we decided to adapt it to people with visual impairments. According to WHO, there are more than 160,000 visually impaired people in Kazakhstan. Despite that, something as widespread as cosmetics does not take the needs of those people into account .

To address this, we contacted a group of specialists who translated both Russian and Kazakh versions of our book to Braille.

Collaboration With A Local GMP Standard Company "TelliKz"

Our team has collaborated with on of the largest local Global Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standard companies - TelliKz. We conducted several conferences where we discussed our problem and asked for their support for our further event.

TelliKz has provided us with 100+ organic cosmetic products. This was a significant step in our inclusivity journey, as we used these products in our next outreach activity.

By collaborating with such a large-scale and prestigious company, we show our readiness for pushing beyond limits to achieve our goal and help as much individuals as we can.

School For Visually Impaired Students

On October 6th of 2025, our team visited a school for blind students where we organized an outreach event. At the beginning, we introduced them to the IGEM competition and our project. After that, we played different games, and conducted other entertaining and interactive activities, such as debates.

Moreover, we presented and read our educational book, discussed the main idea, and received their feedback, which was unanimously positive. Our main goal was to show that everyone has a right for safety when using cosmetics regardless of their physical abilities.

At the end of the event, we gifted 29 kits of cosmetics to 29 students, giving away a total of 116 self-care products. We attached informative labels in Braille onto each package, which is certainly a novelty in Kazakhstan as there are little to no cosmetics labels that provide information in Braille.

To adapt the lables, we:

1. Studied how the printed (stick-on) Braille looks on products.
2. Selected the optimal size of stick-on labels.
3. Translated key phrases and abbreviations into Braille:

   h.c. - hand cream

   f.c. - face cream

   b.l – body lotion

   s.o. – shampoo for oily roots

   h.b. – hair balm

   s – shampoo

We also printed over 200 stickers with Braille and gifted them to these students, so they can stick them to their own products and easily identify them.

Our main goal is to make cosmetics safer to everyone, and first step for it - make them easier to recognize, especially for people with physical disabilities.

Student Feedback

To understand what real-life impact our idea bore, we asked the students from the school to give us feedback on the sticker usage:

Dias: "I could recognize products by touching them, but some bottles were same and I would confuse shampoo with shower gel. These stickers will change everything. I'm grateful that there are people who care about even the little things that cause inconvenience for people like us."

Marzhan: "I've never even thought about this idea. It's so simple,yet no one actually cares about such small things, but that will make my life easier. Sometimes I put paints in my makeup bag by accident and then end up applying them on my skin because I simply can't distinguish them. I will definitely use these stickers on my products. Thank you."

We received even more positive feedbacks, which means that our approach reached them and will improve their daily lives. We were immensely glad to have made this positive contribution in these children's lives.

Inclusion In Action

Our team welcomed a Soior, our peer with Cerebral Palsy, offering him a place on our team free of charge.

He made a big contribution to our team with his outstanding ideas and work, proving that physical limitations do not prevent anyone from taking part in scientific research and teamwork.

Thanks to his personal experience and unique perspective, he suggested an idea that became a crucial part of our work - the creation of a Telegram bot that helps users analyze cosmetic ingredients. The bot operates in Kazakh, Russian and English languages.

NIS-Kazakhstan's idea is to create a biosensor that is easy to use. Based on his own needs and daily challenges, Soior explained that for people with disabilities like Cerebral Palsy, a portable and easy-to-use mobile tool would be even more convenient and inclusive.

Inspired by his view, our team developed this bot which became an important part of our inclusivity efforts. Through his experience and ideas, Soior showed that inclusivity can bring diversity of thought and perspective into any team.

Impact and Conclusion

By popularizing education, we believe we can increase people's interest in science and its impact on our lives. We thus believe our we did a good job at making education and science reachable for people with different ethnical and physical backgrounds. Moreover, we indeed took part in making people's daily lives easier and more comfortable, and there's no greater reward than that.