L’Oréal’s Barbara Lavernos on Staying on Top in Beauty Tech
PARIS — Tech is a fast-moving game, and L’Oréal is keen to stay at the top.
Starting Wednesday, the beauty giant will showcase its most recent innovations at the four-day VivaTech show here, with a focus on how technology will allow the company to enable “beauty for all and beauty for each” — a new tag line homing in on ultra-personalization and nodding toward a more diverse, inclusive beauty sector.
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“Tech is really empowering us with new features and new capabilities that were unimaginable before,” L’Oréal deputy chief executive officer in charge of research, innovation and technology Barbara Lavernos told WWD in an exclusive interview.
The new tag line expands on L’Oréal’s previous tag line, “Beauty for all.”
“Beauty for all is really the first part of the vision,” Lavernos said. “Beauty for each can meet the unique demands of each individual.”
L’Oréal’s global managing director of augmented beauty and open innovation Guive Balooch explained, “You can’t have beauty for everyone if you don’t have beauty for each person. You need to understand each individual, and only through technology will you be able to do that.”
L’Oréal began investing heavily in digital around 15 years ago, and e-commerce now represents around a third of its sales. More recently, the group has shifted its broader focus toward tech. It now employs 5,900 people in digital-related positions and has been buying in through acquisitions like ModiFace, in 2018, and this January, through its BOLD fund, with an investment in metaverse developer Digital Village. It has also been ramping up partnerships with technology developers and open innovation.
“We decided four or five years ago to champion beauty tech,” Lavernos said. “In today’s world, being the leader in beauty means by definition being the leader in beauty tech.”
To stay ahead, the company needs “deep expertise in various fields,” Lavernos said. This is essential to fight through what she described as “toys and noise” and deliver real benefits.
Now, L’Oréal is working on turning its initiatives into tangible market solutions.
“Everything is related to consumer needs and consumer tensions, consumer expectations,” Lavernos said. “These techs are levers, triggers to meet what were obstacles before.”
Balooch added, “It’s not about tech, it’s about taking beauty to the next level with tech.”
From ideation to product, L’Oréal’s tech dissemination works pretty much in the same way as its approach to developing new actives for its formulas, the executives explained. “It’s like for formulation of ingredients, you have advanced research that must be agnostic, and must aggregate the different technologies,” Lavernos said.
“When we have a mock-up that works and we have an idea of the scale of the capabilities, the maturity of the scale-up, and the cost, it allows us to identify which cluster of brands, and then we enter arbitration; sometimes there is a lot of competition from the brands,” she said.
Key innovations on show at the company’s stand at VivaTech will be Hapta from Lancôme, a device to help people with disabilities apply makeup, and 3D shu:brow from Shu Uemura, a connected device printing tailored eyebrow makeup onto the face. Both were developed in response to consumer friction points.
The former uses Verily’s technology, originally developed as an eating aid. “People say it’s niche, but we don’t believe that,” Balooch said. “One in 10 people have motor disabilities, that’s near 1 billion people in the world unable to access the beauty industry.”
Driving demand for the latter was the postulate that “nine out of 10 women cannot shape their brow properly today,” Balooch said. The device connects to a smartphone and uses ModiFace technology and algorithms to determine the perfect brow shape, which the cosmetic-grade inkjet device then prints onto the face.
Prototypes for both were unveiled at CES in Las Vegas in January, and they are now ready for market deployment. “At CES, it’s really about tech, it’s one or two years away. At VivaTech, we come with a story, with the impact, with the brands,” Balooch explained. Hapta will launch next year in the U.S. and select European countries, priced between $149 and $199, while 3D shu:brow, launching late 2024, will be in the same price range.
Also showing at VivaTech is a collaboration between Maybelline and Microsoft Teams to offer virtual makeup, for free. “It’s not a filter, it’s digital makeup, developed in our labs with our proprietary ModiFace technology,” Lavernos explained. That innovation launches this July.
There is also K-Scan from Kérastase. Developed in-house and with 12 patents, the company claims it is the first data-powered tool analyzing both scalp and hair at high resolution and for all hair types — a major challenge when it came to training the algorithms involved, Lavernos said.
“Tech is redefining our value proposition toward consumers and hairstylists,” stated L’Oréal Professional Products Division president Omar Hajeri. “Through tech, we are creating the most powerful [business-to-business] ecosystem in the professional beauty industry. We want to push the boundaries of our current market, with hairstylists at heart, and tech as our accelerator.”
Tech is also helping the company double down on sustainability, notably as related to its digital operations. At VivaTech, L’Oréal will showcase its new partnership with French firm Impact+ to help measure the carbon footprint of its digital ecosystem. “Today, digital activity is known as being the equivalent of 4 percent of all air traffic,” Lavernos said. “It’s quite new and difficult to find the technology today that is accurate in reviewing CO2 emissions [for digital operations],” she said.
In the background, L’Oréal’s teams continue to monitor an array of emerging technologies. Some will disappear, others will potentially evolve into the market’s next big opportunities, Lavernos said.
“I’m both Darwinian and I’m a tech optimist,” she explained. “That’s really the motto of L’Oréal, we look at each and every new science and technology. We evaluate and assess the risks, to make sure we are really entering a safe zone both for our company and for consumers,” Lavernos said. “We are exploring everything, cautiously, but with a lot of commitment. I’m an engineer, and since the birth of humanity, each revolution has augmented people, freed people, so tech can be part of that game.”
Take generative AI, for example. “Everybody knows that Gen AI today, there are a lot of risks, risks about IP, copyright, bias, confidentiality. I believe Gen AI is a very interesting capability. Gen AI will not, as is said everywhere, destroy jobs. It will undoubtedly move people from the way they are doing some tasks in making time for what matters more,” she said. “Will it be big, will it be enormous, will it be in the field of creativity, in the field of science? Today I have no clue.”
And L’Oréal, like humankind, must adapt. “The species that adapt are the ones that survive,” Lavernos said.
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