L’Oréal’s New At-Home Device Makes Personalized Beauty Products, Signaling the Democratization of Cosmetics

This post was originally published on this site

L’Oréal’s next big tech bet is on a tiny device that’s only 6.5 inches tall and weighs just over one pound, but will let beauty enthusiasts create their own personalized cosmetics at home.

At CES in Las Vegas this week, the French cosmetics and beauty giant will debut a new hardware device called Perso, which whips up compressed beauty formulas from physical cartridges to create on-the-spot skincare, lipstick, and foundations. Think of it like a mini makeup Keurig, but instead of getting a specialized espresso drink, you’ll be creating a unique pink lipstick or skin cream.

“It’s a long-term relationship with the consumer,” says Guive Balooch, head of L’Oréal’s Technology Incubator. Balooch says that Perso’s goal over time is to get smarter about a consumer’s skin and makeup preferences and fine tune recommended formulas.

For skincare, Perso’s app will take into
account the local air quality, temperature, humidity, and other factors that
fluctuate and affect the skin. It then creates a recipe that even adjusts
depending on if you are applying the skincare formula in the morning or the
evening.

Perso’s hardware features a proprietary motor system located at the top of the device, which moves and compresses the formula from the cartridges at the base of the machine in an upward motion to the dispensing tray above for a clean application.

The lipstick option is more focused on playful
trends. Perso has a base of three different colors: light pink, red, and
purple, and to create a shade, users can take a picture of themselves and the
app will then recommend a shade based on hair color, clothing and skin tone.
Users can also create shades based on what’s trending on social media at the
time.

Perso is essentially all about
tech-enabled personalization, a trend making waves in a variety of consumer product
categories, including apparel, food and beverage, and footwear.

“Everyone understand the value of
personalization and no one owns that more than beauty because it is in their
foundation,” says Genevieve Aronson, vice president of communications at
Nielsen.

Perso’s patented motorized cartridge system.

Embracing
personalization is a way for
beauty makers like L’Oréal to boost the industry’s sales. In-store beauty sales
total approximately $37 billion in the U.S. market, but annual growth is
reported at just 1% over the past two years, according to Nielsen. And yet personalized
products are 1.7 times more likely to drive sales, says Aronson. So placing a
greater emphasis on personalization can potentially help jolt beauty sales.

Increasingly, beauty startups are leaning
on data and technology to create products that are even more specialized for
the end user. Function of Beauty and Prose, both new to the beauty business,
created shampoos and conditioners that are based on custom formulas. Proven
Skincare has a similar pitch for skincare.

L’Oréal, the leading beauty purveyor with
over 29% of the global market, is also doing work in this arena. The company
has updated over 24,000 salons globally to offer personalized hair assessments
like scalp diagnostics. The Kérastase brand sells personalized haircare
products, while SkinCeuticals’ Custom D.O.S.E. creates personalized anti-ageing
and pigmentation products after a user visits a dermatologist for an assessment.

“The only way to achieve beauty for all
is through technology,” says Balooch. “You can go to a [makeup] counter and
find 40 to 50 shades of foundation. But the reality is, there are far more
people with different shades than those options.”

The “My UV Patch” app, unveiled at CES in 2016.

Over the past several years, L’Oréal has
used CES as a springboard for the technologies it has launched under the
company’s tech incubator. Past inventions have included a stretchable
skin sensor designed to
monitor ultraviolet light exposure and a connected
“smart” hairbrush. L’Oréal’s
Incubator team especially won high praise for its augmented reality app Makeup
Genius, which was launched in 2014.

Testing for Perso hit a bit of a snag
during the development process when Balooch and his team realized that the
application wasn’t quite nailing skincare recommendations for individuals with
darker skin tones. “It was a lot harder than we had anticipated,” Balooch says,
adding that for foundation, 50% of women say they can’t find the exact shade they’d
like at the store.

So L’Oréal spent an additional six months
testing the product with 400 women, varying from very light to very dark skin. “We
realized we had to measure peoples’ skintones, put the product on skin, and
then achieve the match,” says Balooch.

Still, some key details need to be ironed out for Perso. Balooch says L’Oréal hasn’t yet solidified distribution for the Perso system and no-pricing structure has been set for the device or the cartridges that would need to be re-ordered over time. The goal is to launch the technology in 2021.