At L’Oréal Groupe, beauty is never only skin deep. That’s more true today than ever, as the company combines its profound scientific expertise with cutting-edge technology to reinvent the future of beauty. Key to its success is its commitment to never use tech for tech’s sake. All its innovations meet a clear consumer need and support its aims of sustainable production, personalized beauty, and inclusive treatments. L’Oréal Professionnel’s Water Saver, for example, uses patented water fragmentation technology to save up to 60% of water used at salon backbars. Meanwhile, L’Oréal’s Lancôme, in partnership with Alphabet healthtech company Verily, recently produced the world’s first handheld computerized makeup applicator, empowering women with arm and hand mobility issues to apply lipstick precisely.
Underpinning these innovations is L’Oréal’s extensive research into the science of beauty. One particular area of interest at L’Oréal is how the exposome affects the health and appearance of people’s skin and hair. The exposome is the name given to the combination of environmental factors such as air quality, UV, and weather that people are exposed to every day. L’Oréal is fascinated by it and has built up a wealth of knowledge on the subject. Yet it needed to transform this extensive exposome knowledge into personalized beauty and skincare treatments by better understanding consumers’ unique environmental data.
Until recently, encouraging consumers to monitor their environmental data required effort few were willing to make. L’Oréal tried getting customers to use wearable devices to record their exposure, but not everyone wanted to buy one. It asked them to log their movements in an app, but many users either forgot or gave up altogether. L’Oréal needed to find a way to gather exposome data in a way that made it easy for the consumer.
Using the Environment APIs L'Oreal was able to build an exposome platform showing exactly what customers’ skin and hair have been exposed to based on their precise location.
Now, with the Environment APIs from Google Maps Platform, L’Oréal can do just that. These APIs give L’Oréal accurate, granular environmental information for any given location. Having all this data synced in one place has enabled the company to build an exposome platform showing exactly what customers’ skin and hair have been exposed to based on their precise location.
“Air quality, pollution, pollen, weather all these things really affect our skin,” explains Fred Orsita, Head of Tech Innovation, Augmented Beauty at L’Oreal. “So the fact that the Environment APIs allow us to sync all this data perfectly and have it all in one place means we can extend the power of the recommendations and the insights we can give to our customers. That is unique.”
Giving online skin diagnosis a makeover with the Air Quality API
With the Air Quality API, L’Oréal can see the exact concentration of specific pollutants in the air at a given time. It can also pinpoint the specific exposome data to a resolution of 500 meters, which is important given how much air quality can change even across short distances.
With this precise data L’Oréal has significantly enhanced its online skin diagnosis service. Previously, customers would upload a selfie to the L’Oréal app, where algorithms would score the customer’s skin. Now, it can integrate this information with the air quality data from the customer’s location to gain a rich understanding of what’s happening to their skin and hair, and recommend personalized treatments. With so many products available, it’s important customers can find the right ones for them. The more L’Oréal knows about a customer, the better its recommendations.
Beauty advisors can use exposome data to understand how to repair damage, or treat a specific condition insights to build the customer a personalized skincare regime.
“The richer the insights, the more personalized the treatment,” says Nathalie Cabut, Global Head of Digital Services at L’Oreal. “By integrating hyperlocal air quality data, we're not just analyzing skin; we're understanding each individual's unique environmental story to deliver truly personalized beauty solutions."
Enhancing in-store experiences with historic exposome data
L’Oréal is using exposome data to transform customers’ in-store experiences, too. With historical data of up to 30 days on the Air Quality API, it has a clear view of what the customer’s skin has been exposed to over the last month. So when a customer has a face scan in the store, it can overlay its analysis of the image with its knowledge of the environment the customer has been exposed to.
For a beauty advisor, being able to look at historical data to explain what they’re seeing is very powerful. They can see what’s happened to a customer’s skin over the last month and understand how to repair damage, or treat a specific condition, then use those insights to build the customer a personalized skincare regime.
Innovating toward a beautiful future
The Environment APIs are also driving L’Oréal’s research and development of new products. It’s now easier for the company to ask research participants to track their environmental exposure. Instead of using a wearable device, they can simply download an app that tracks their movements, and the Air Quality API will automatically give L’Oréal a detailed view of all the environmental factors they’ve been exposed to. Being able to see what’s happening to skin over time, and to understand exactly why, is incredibly useful. L’Oréal expects these kinds of insights to uncover new, unique skincare scenarios the company hasn’t explored before, leading it to develop new products to treat them.
Having made the Environment APIs available to all its teams, L’Oréal is using them to innovate right across the business. It’s speaking to dermatologists about how it can use data about specific pollutants to recommend targeted treatments for adverse skin conditions. It’s also exploring ways to integrate its exposome data into its AI-powered cosmetic devices to enable customers to receive a single dose of skincare treatment uniquely tailored to their skin’s needs.
“At L’Oréal, we love to solve a persistent consumer need with technology,” says Orsita. “With the Google Maps Platform, we now have insights that are concrete and informed, and we can finally have the conversations and make specific, personalized recommendations that we always wanted to.”
With Google Maps Platform and the data from the Environment APIs, L’Oréal is transforming its deep skincare expertise into personalized recommendations to meet its customers’ unique needs—and reinventing the future of beauty in the process.
