Historians have discovered that beauty—and our desire to achieve it and the essential human need to feel it—is intrinsic, showing up in different forms and expressions across cultures and societies.
We have also discovered that there is a science to changing our looks. Literally. In 1909, a young French chemist named Eugène Schueller created the world's first safe, synthetic hair color formula, and with that discovery, L’Oréal was founded. In the 115 years since, the company has employed thousands of scientists to make innovative beauty products accessible to billions of people across the planet. But the revolution of beauty tech is just a 10-year-long story.
A decade ago, L’Oréal was the first beauty company to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the largest technology trade shows in the world. Founded in 1967, the show’s early years saw the debut of recordable blank tapes, music players, and satellites. In 2015, L’Oréal showed up and showed out, and what a busy decade it has been since.
L’Oréal has received nearly 20 CES Innovation Awards in half of that number in years. “Reflecting upon the last decade, one of the things that I’ve really realized as the leader of this team, is the importance of starting with what people need,” says Guive Balooch, Global Managing Director of Augmented Beauty and Open Innovation. Indeed, technology informs more than just the products we use; it creates solutions for the problems—big and small—that we encounter in our daily lives and in the times we live in.
Over the years, L’Oréal has focused its engineering, research, and development on using technology to make each product more accessible, more effective, and more sustainable. It’s a foundation that’s been decades in the making. “L’Oréal is uniquely positioned by the fact that we have 4,000 scientists dedicated solely to research,” adds Deputy CEO and Chief Research, Innovation, and Technology Officer, Barbara Lavernos. That research is used to develop innovative products, but also to shift the industry through technological advances.
To combat bias, L’Oréal has developed fundamentally less biased algorithms that can detect and analyze different skin issues more inclusively. “Our algorithms have been trained on over 150,000 dermatologist-annotated images from a fully inclusive data set…. This level of accuracy proves that we have built diagnostics that transcend being just a tool for product sales,” says Lavernos. HAPTA, a handheld robotized makeup applicator that debuted at CES 2023, is another product that has led the beauty tech movement at L’Oréal and created solutions for consumers. “For me, HAPTA represents what CES is all about: Harnessing the power of tech to solve real human challenges and improve lives,” says Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, which produces CES.
During the keynote, Lavernos shared a short video featuring three models who tested HAPTA while experiencing limited mobility in their hands and arms. “I have a spinal cord injury and it affects my body by limiting my motor neurons,” shares Natasha Urkow, a theater artist from Canada. “I like to do myself up—I like to wear makeup to go out to look good. The device is really cool…it's very ergonomic. Different people can use it with different abilities.”
Making beauty tech that provides solutions and efficiencies to people’s daily lives is a core tenet of each L’Oréal product that has debuted at CES. The L’Oréal COLORSONIC is a handheld device that mixes and applies hair color evenly and cleanly, allowing consumers to have consistent and high-quality hair color results at home for less than $150. It uses recyclable cartridges of color and developer, which results in 50 percent less plastic than other at-home hair color products. COLORSONIC mixes and evenly distributes the formula on every strand of hair through oscillating nozzles, avoiding streaking, patchiness, and hair damage, much to the delight of actress Eva Longoria, who joined CEO, Nicolas Hieronimus and Lavernos onstage. “I've been coloring my hair at home since I was 18,” says Longoria. “I'm used to the gloves and the towel and all of that stuff but using this device…[This is] genuinely my excitement. It just makes everything so much easier to do, and the results are incredible.”
L’Oréal earned seven CES Innovation Awards this year spanning from the digital health category to sustainability and smart energy categories. The winners included AirLight Pro, a smart hair dryer made in collaboration with Zuvi, a hardware startup company established by drone engineers and leading scientists, that uses infrared light and wind rather than convection methods, which keeps hair smoother and more hydrated while using less energy. Other winners were the L’Oréal Professional Water Saver showerhead, made in partnership with Gjosa, which saves up to 69% of the water used in salon back bars; Giorgio Armani Meta Profiler, a handheld device incorporating a real-time hydration sensor and a high precision camera to decode your skin; YSL Beauté’s Scent-Sation, a unique fragrance consultation experience that uses a multi-sensor EEG-based headset to help consumers determine the perfect scent based on their emotional response; L'Oréal Face Facts, a first-of-its-kind environmental skin health coaching app; Maybelline Virtual Looks, which allows the 280 million-plus users of Microsoft Teams to wear the brand’s best-selling products virtually; and Lancôme’s Skin Screen, a breakthrough skin analysis service that uses a combination of tri-polar light technology and advanced, patented algorithms to measure and assess key skin parameters, which earned the top honor and Best of Innovation for Digital Imaging and Photography category.
Each of these products, as Hieronimus stated in the keynote, reemphasizes the human need for beauty—in expressing who we are and how we interact with others. “Beauty is not just a me-thing, it's a we-thing,” he says. “Beauty is like a social glue that attracts us to one another. Sometimes we follow norms to show we belong to a group and other times we challenge those norms to…express our hope for change and to give recognition to the progress over the last 100,000 years.”
Indeed, looking back 100,000 years as Hieronimus suggests can show us how far we’ve come. But after watching L’Oréal’s CES keynote, it’s obvious that you can come quite a long way in just 10 years.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Advertiser.
