L’Oréal now calls itself a “beauty tech” company, and Guive Balooch has been driving the transition.
“What has been really amazing is for the last hundreds of years in beauty, everything was based on chemistry,” said the global managing director, augmented beauty and open innovation at L’Oréal, during a conversation with Jenny B. Fine, editor in chief of Beauty Inc and executive editor, beauty, at WWD. “Everything was about formulas, creams and serums, and it continues to be, but now over the last 10 years, what we’ve seen is this enormous movement in technology.”
There’s been the advent of digital services, such as virtual try-ons, and devices bolstering beauty treatments’ performance.
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“It’s this combination of technology and science that is moving so quickly with consumer demands and needs to be met,” Balooch said.
Balooch believes for a beauty company to cross the divide, it needs to have a major commitment that tech will be the driver of future business from an organizational perspective. It is to inform people and allow for their beauty desires. While in the early days, Balooch and his team worked primarily with outside tech companies, fast-forward to today, and L’Oréal has in-house tech abilities, too.
“That requires resilience, investment and understanding,” said Balooch.
Also key is understanding consumers’ deep needs prior to creating the technology, to make sure real problems are being solved. One such recent example is L’Oréal Paris Colorsonic, billed to be the first device to make hair color easy to use at home by automatically mixing and depositing formula at the roots. The innovation stemmed from a competition within L’Oréal.
New tech can take from 18 months to years to conceive. Colorsonic took about eight years, due the various intricacies. “This could be a revolution,” said Balooch. “So it’s worth investments.”
Externally, L’Oréal works with the likes of Gjosa in Switzerland on water-fractioning technology for showerheads.
Balooch and his team listen to internal and external partners’ ideas. “There’s no equation. We’re just open,” he said. “What we do notice when things don’t work…it’s usually because we’re thinking about the tech first and not the need of people.”
L’Oréal’s first UV sensor, from La Roche-Posay, is an example from many years back. “A wearable just to measure UV was something that people didn’t want to have,” said Balooch.
It’s crucial, too, to quickly assess whether tech is really making an impact and the challenges to make it happen.
“That being said, a lot of our failures led to successes later,” said Balooch.
What about personalized products or experiences? “Personalization is such a big term,” he said. “It’s about individuality and beauty for each person. It is going to be the future of beauty.
“Every person wants to have the right product for them, understanding their biology, environments, needs and lifestyles,” he continued.
Within L’Oréal, this is being called “precision beauty.” The group just began a clinical study with Verily, an Alphabet company, to track 10,000 people over four years to see if it’s possible to unlock some of the biomarkers showing whether a beauty product is right for an individual user.
“This is going to be a big part of skin-tech and bio-tech,” said Balooch.
Among what excites him most when thinking about the future is the merging of miniature devices and artificial intelligence, “this link between physical and digital,” he explained.
Think of the automatic makeup machine from the 1997 film “Fifth Element.”
“That’s not so far away,” said Balooch.
