One assignee leads clearly with 2,627 records in this dataset, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 387 and the tenth-ranked filer at 277. Even so, the top 5 combined account for only 24.0% of all 25,051 records in scope and the top 10 combined for 30.0%, so most of the field's patenting sits with a long tail of smaller filers rather than a handful of dominant players. Anyone doing freedom-to-operate work should check both the leader's core claims and this long tail, since a large share of relevant prior art sits outside the top-ranked names.

Filing activity peaked in 2019 at 835 records and has eased since, with the cleanest complete-year comparison showing 627 filings in 2021 falling to 447 in 2024, a 29% decline over that span. Counts for 2025 and 2026 in the raw data look lower still, but that is expected because publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years are not yet fully reported. Read the recent pull-back as real but treat the very latest years as understated rather than as evidence of a sharper drop.

This filing, from FEYECON B.V. and dated 2011-07-14, claims a microencapsulate with microcapsules 0.1 to 25 microns in diameter, a core particle 90nm to 23 microns carrying at least 3% active by weight, and a coating that is at least 20 wt% of a specific list of hydrophobic polymers including cellulosic ethers and esters, zein, shellac, gluten, polylactide, and acrylic or methacrylic ester-derived polymers. It does not block every encapsulation approach; formulations using coating materials outside that polymer list, or particle sizes clearly outside the stated ranges, sit outside its literal claim scope. Anyone working close to these size and coating parameters should read the full claim set rather than rely on the abstract, since the boundary values are specific and enforceable.

A61K, the general medicinal-preparations class, appears on 62.2% of the 25,051 records in scope, making it by far the densest classification. A61P therapeutic-activity claims follow at 29.6% and C07D heterocyclic-compound claims at 25.1%, while the cosmetics-specific A61Q class covers only 5.0% of records. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100%, and they point to most of the encapsulation art in this corpus being written and classified as pharmaceutical delivery technology rather than as cosmetics technology specifically.

The classification data suggests the cosmetics-specific A61Q branch, at only 5.0% of records, and the process-heavy B01J branch, at 4.6%, are comparatively thin relative to the dominant A61K medicinal-preparations art at 62.2%. That gap does not mean the space is empty, but it does mean claims drafted specifically around cosmetic-use release triggers, low-unit-cost microencapsulation processes, or peptide-stable cosmetic carriers face a shallower prior-art field than a generic delivery-vehicle claim would. A differentiation strategy built on these narrower, cosmetics-specific mechanisms is more likely to clear examination cleanly than one that reasserts the broad liposome or microcapsule architecture already covered by the most-cited records in this corpus.