With the acceleration of new technologies, L’Oréal is enhancing its capacity for innovation, creating and developing products, services and beauty experiences that are increasingly personalised and inclusive.
Its Augmented Beauty business line makes it possible for L’Oréal to use algorithms and artificial intelligence to increase the power of its 100-year-old legacy of information on skin, hair and biomarkers. Augmented Beauty seeks to meet and anticipate consumer expectations by offering breakthrough innovations that incorporate new and ever-more personalised experiences with services and applications. This also means that L’Oréal can directly connect with and reach out to more and more consumers, collecting information on their beauty rituals, their use of products, their everyday concerns, and gathering their opinions in real time – all while complying with and safeguarding laws on consumers’ data privacy.
L’Oréal has entered into several strategic partnerships with scientific “Tech” specialists in order to reinforce its knowledge and understand how beauty can be affected by hormonal activity, sleep and environmental conditions, particularly pollution.
At the beginning of 2022(1), an unprecedented partnership was signed between L’Oréal and Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet specialising in precision health. The aim is to decrypt the ageing mechanisms of hair and skin and inform L’Oréal’s strategy and product development with new precision beauty technologies. This combination will enable L’Oréal to pool its profound scientific knowledge of skin with Verily’s comprehensive clinical research capabilities, to decode and discover the links between exposome, skin aging, and deep biology of the skin. It will also make it possible to explore the development of new technologies and tele-diagnosis solutions such as sensors, and Artificial Intelligence algorithms for dermatology and skincare, that can form the basis for new services.
L’Oréal has announced a partnership with Clue, an app dedicated to menstrual cycles, to enrich knowledge about the impact of hormonal cycles on skin health and quality. This collaboration combines L’Oréal’s historical expertise in skincare knowledge with Clue’s leadership in menstrual cycle data thanks to its 12 million subscribers in 190 countries. It will also be enriched by the participation of dermatologists, endocrinologists and gynaecologists with whom the Group already works. Thanks to the enrichment of this knowledge, all consumers will benefit from the best personalised skincare routines, from the first menstrual cycle to the menopause, taking into account the health of their skin, as well as their beauty and well-being aspirations.
L’Oréal has entered a long-term research partnership with BreezoMeter, a leader in environmental information on air quality, pollen and fire. The aim is to improve the health and safety of billions of people around the world by providing accurate, exploitable data (filters, UV, pollution, etc.). The respective expertise of the partners in skin sciences and the climate environment will combine to develop an exposome platform based around beauty, able to offer practical advice to consumers on their skin routines to combat the effects of their environment on skin ageing.
L’Oréal today has a powerful R&I model with a level of expertise and a wealth of scientific and technical data, which represent a true asset. Advanced Research teams create, develop and source raw materials, drawing on the knowledge of skin and hair from around the world; the Applied Research teams then develop formula architectures that improve the performance of assets, and the Development laboratories create innovative formulas with a proven superiority for each brand. This innovation model is nurtured by a constant dialogue between the laboratories and marketing to respond to the expectations of consumers, supporting them with the latest technological breakthroughs.
In order to adapt to consumer expectations worldwide, L’Oréal’s Research teams work in 20 cosmetics research centres and 13 assessment centres. The research centres are grouped into three global centres in France (Advanced Research, Haircare and Cosmetics). The six regional hubs (Japan, US, China, India, South Africa and Brazil) identify consumer needs and study their cosmetics habits. R&I teams build on this rich seam of local scientific ecosystems to develop collaboration agreements and partnerships of excellence. The data generated enables researchers to develop new products, that are perfectly in tune with market needs and local expectations. The innovations produced are also shared in a coordinated way to promote discussion flows.
