From Mass to Me: The Role of New Technology in Personalized Beauty
The idea of personalized beauty is not novel but it has fueled the latest innovations in the beauty industry due to consumer’s being tired of a “one size fits all” approach often taken. Products such as skincare and foundation have always needed to be personalized based on skin color, skin type, and the public’s preferences. Companies over time have been reacting to this need by creating customized beauty subscriptions and now new technology to put personalization at the consumer’s fingertips. This fits with the recent trends coming out of L’Oreal’s beauty incubator. One of the latest innovations to come out of their incubator is a partnership with a neurotechnology company to enhance perfume development.
EMOTIV is known for their mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) that can visualize the brain. One of the advantages of their technology is that it can identify cognitive states such as emotions. L’Oréal Group, the company behind multiple beauty brands such as Yves Saint Laurent (YSL), partnered with Emotiv to use their technology “to help consumers make accurate and personalized choices around their fragrance desires”. This partnership has created a unique fragrance consultation experience that combines EMOTIV’s neurotechnology with scents and algorithms developed by L’Oreal. Together this experience connects a consumer’s neuro response to fragrances through an EEG headset which uses machine learning algorithms to determine the perfect scent suited to their emotions.
This technology made its debut at YSL Beauty’s Scent-Sation, a pop up event in Dubai where consumers wore EEG headsets while developing perfume so that they could “let their brain do the talking”. This experience allowed consumers to be connected to the emotions experienced while sampling multiple scents. Following that pop up event a “polysensorial experience” was created on YSL beauty’s website allowing public users to find their unique fragrance match based on personality and mood. However, there does not seem to be a poly-sensorial aspect to this experience. YSL created a quiz that would suggest a few options of perfumes already on the market that fits the consumers’ mood. While this is great info for an indecisive consumer, the access to the kind of neurological data from EMOTIV’s technology could have more engaging applications such as the creation of personalized scents.
An opportunity like this would allow the consumer to create a scent backed by data and directly engage with the collaborative effort between EMOTIV and YSL. This would be similar to L’Oreal’s launch of Perso. Perso is technology also powered by AI to create customized skincare, foundation, and liquid lipsticks. Not only could this technology create products specific to a consumer’s skin type and preferences but additionally it also takes into account the local environment conditions that could influence a person’s skin such as weather, humidity, etc. This technology launched under YSL beauty back in 2020 so consumers can directly create personalized liquid lipsticks. The viral “lipstick printer” optimized personalization for consumers but also was able to gather data on user’s personal preferences that will hopefully fuel more innovations within L’Oreal’s technology incubator. This push towards personalized beauty opens up new opportunities for scientists and inventors to partner with these brands to create new technologies that enhance a user’s experience.
But while personalized beauty is great — how accessible and long lasting will technology like this be? The previously mentioned lipstick printer retails for $350 and comments have recently stated that the technology is not always reliable and that the app can be complicated to figure out. Moving forward scientists can use this as an opening to not only create technology centering personalization but that can also be long lasting in a consumer’s lifetime.
