AI Is Changing Your Beauty Products and How You Buy Them – CNET [CNET]

I got a firsthand look at what L’Oreal is doing, including an app that could be the closest thing to carrying a stylist in your pocket.

You see an influencer on TikTok recommending a moisturizer or serum or concealer that they promise will transform you into your most gorgeous glowing summer self. You buy the product and try it out, only to realize that it’s all wrong for you. It makes you break out, or it makes your oily skin greasy, or it pills on top of your skin care.

It’s not that the influencer lied necessarily, it’s just that they have a completely different skin type. Or you have the same skin type, but yours, for whatever reason, doesn’t respond well to certain ingredients.

It’s a situation familiar to many of us who’ve tried to navigate the oversaturated world of skin care and beauty – I know, I’ve been there. Sometimes it can feel like I need a degree in chemistry to read ingredients labels on skin care. It seems like high time that we figured out a smarter, more personalized way to shop for products, and fortunately for us, L’Oreal is on the case.

Just as AI is being applied in almost every industry you can think of, beauty companies are now experimenting with the technology to match you with the products that will work best for you. I was just at the Vivatech conference in Paris, where L’Oreal debuted a suite of AI-driven tools that promise everything from skin care analysis to hair color and health analysis to a chatbot that can recommend and help you “try on” products with assistance from augmented reality.

L’Oreal is far from alone in seeing the potential for AI to solve our cosmetic-based gripes. Sephora has also introduced an AI-powered shopping experience, to help you navigate what can be an overwhelming experience of working out what products you may actually need. Many of these efforts are a work in progress, but as a frequently bamboozled buyer of cosmetics, I can see where they’re going and I look forward to it.

“The beauty industry is 1,000 years old of just chemistry, and it’s only been 10 years of tech,” says Guive Balooch, who has led L’Oreal’s tech incubator throughout this period. In this decade, the company has experimented extensively with emerging technologies, and has won CES Awards for products including assistive technology for applying makeup.

But during the past 10 years, the company has also learned lessons about jumping on tech trends that may seem exciting in the moment but end up petering out, ultimately doing nothing to enhance customer relationships or its products, says Balooch. Instead of taking beauty and slapping it on top of every new tech trend, it’s about seeing if there is a way for tech to solve problems in the beauty industry. 

L’Oreal’s AI-powered Beauty Genius app

That’s what L’Oreal hopes it has achieved with Beauty Genius, its new AI-powered app that’s the closest thing right now to carrying a stylist in your pocket. “Fundamentally, it’s actually not about AI,” says Balooch. “It’s about what people need and the tensions that have been around for so long when it comes to beauty rituals.”

One of the use cases that I’m personally most interested in is the app’s ability to diagnose changes in your skin, such as increased dark circles under your eyes compared to the previous day, before helping you adjust your routine accordingly by recommending which products you might want to use there and then. 

As someone who struggles with redness, as well as unpredictable flare-ups of acne and intermittent perioral dermatitis, my big wish for Beauty Genius is that it can help me identify incoming skin problems and then recommend products that will both conceal and calm any issues, rather than exacerbate them.

There’s significant crossover between beauty and dermatology, and it makes sense that Balooch was a science guy before he was a tech guy. With a background in medical bioengineering, his vision for beauty is one in which technology fuels both hyper-personalization and demystification of skin care.

“There could be a day very soon where I could measure a biomarker on your skin and I could tell you if certain products will make your skin react well and are suited for your biology,” he says.

In the meantime, L’Oreal has integrated all the data it’s accumulated through internal clinical testing with user feedback from anonymized online reviews and customer service conversations to create a powerful dataset relating to 750 different products. It plans to use this to provide personalized recommendations that will meet your specific skin care needs.

Beauty and the bot

Beauty Genius will also function as a beauty-specific version of the AI chatbots many of us have already become accustomed to. Imagine you’ve purchased a serum, for example, but you don’t know whether you should use it in the morning or evening, once per day or once per week, before or after another product. Beauty Genius should be able to use the data it’s gathered to provide you with answers to your questions in an unstructured conversation in the style of ChatGPT.

If it gets this right, Beauty Genius could eradicate the trial and error many of us go through when buying skin care products and cosmetics, which often results in us wasting money on products that don’t suit our skin. In theory, this should also reduce the amount of waste the industry produces by selling unloved products that end up gathering dust in medicine cabinets everywhere. 

There are few companies better placed than L’Oreal to experiment with AI, given that it’s the world’s largest cosmetics company with a vast portfolio of products. Under its umbrella are luxury beauty brands such as Lancome, drugstore heroes like NYX and dermatological skin care brands ranging from Cerave to Skinceuticals. Most of us who use beauty products likely have at least one L’Oreal-brand tincture or potion in our collections.

Ultimately there’s a chance that if L’Oreal has got AI right it may result in fewer product sales overall, but it seems as though this is a hit the company is willing to take. “We definitely promote sustainable consumption,” the company’s Chief Digital and Marketing Officer Asmita Dubey says in an interview.

In my short time playing with the app, it encouraged me to try out shades of lipstick I’d usually be too nervous to experiment with. Thanks to the app’s ability to analyze my skin, hair and eye tone using the camera, it pulled up some options that looked surprisingly good on me – although I’m still not convinced I’d be brave enough to stray far from my natural lip.

Beauty Genius is still in beta right now, but L’Oreal will soon be putting the app into the hands of 1,000 users to play with. “We’re using our scientific, clinical data, then test and test and test,” says Balooch. “And only when we feel that it works for everyone do we launch it.”

More widely, the company has launched a generative AI lab to experiment with content production across different platforms and markets, as well as partnering with Meta on a creator program specifically experimenting with AR, AI and 3D content production in the beauty space. 

In the north of Paris, at L’Oreal’s packaging laboratory, designers have been using the AI image-generation tool Midjourney for the past year to play with concepts for perfume and foundation bottles. When they started using the software, some of the designers on the team were afraid it would replace them, says Jordan Moline, global head of UX design for L’Oreal. But they quickly found that it was an inspiring way to work. 

“We are the architects of the creation,” says Moline. It allows his team to play more freely with new sustainable materials and generate more options from an original concept.

It’s clear that AI is affecting the beauty industry across the board, from the products we buy to how we buy them. As with many applications of this relatively new tech, beauty companies are still finding their way. But if L’Oreal’s vision comes to fruition, the future could mean a more personalized, confident and creative relationship with the skin care and cosmetic products we use every day.