When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed most cosmetics sales into a DTC environment, personal care and beauty brands had to get more creative about digital retail spaces. Companies are also developing new tools to improve products or customer experiences.
While some technologies are nearly table stakes in the cosmetics industry today, others are still in the early stages of discovery as far as customer and brand applications.
Read more about technology in the beauty industry with these CosmeticsDesign articles.
L'Oréal launches to bring “new age” tech, data to in-home, salon hair coloring
L'Oréal has launched two new technologies for mass-market consumers and stylists, developed to circumvent hair coloring problems “only technology could solve.”
The company announced the Colorsonic and Coloright technologies on Monday, ahead of CES 2022. Both products, Colorsonic for consumers and Coloright for hairstylists, address ease-of-use with color application.
Head of the L'Oréal Global Technology Incubator Guive Balooch said they’re particularly excited about making these innovations in the hair coloring space, which the company launched more than a century ago.
“What we've seen in the past 100 years is lots of innovation in the types of formulas and colors to get to the right chemistry,” Balooch told cosmetics design. “But the way of actually applying it on the hair, both at home and in the salon, hasn't really changed at all.”
Walmart launches prestige beauty retail space online with Space NK, soon in-store
Q&A
Walmart launched BEAUTYSPACENK with Space NK to bring prestige personal care to the retail giant's online and in-store sales spaces. CosmeticsDesign spoke with Laurie Tessier, merchandising director for prestige beauty at Walmart, about the launch.
Tell me a bit about what the BEAUTYSPACENK retail space is and where the concept came from.
This unique collaboration, called BEAUTYSPACENK, leverages Walmart’s size and scale with the iconic British personal care and beauty company’s assortment of high-quality beauty brands and products. Customers will now have a convenient way to shop both beauty staples and prestige specialty items during their weekly Walmart shopping trip.
Custom hair care brand Prose teaming with BreezoMeter to create precise protective beauty
Protective beauty is the cosmetic industry’s answer to environmental impacts on skin and hair health, and a custom hair care brand is teaming up with BreezoMeter to get precise about pollution.
Prose is a custom hair care brand that takes in 85 data points including scalp condition, lifestyle, styling techniques and, importantly, exactly where the customer lives in the United States or Canada.
Co-founder of Prose Nicolas Mussat said the brand uses the information on where their customer lives to make hair care formulation specifically for the environmental elements they face, like UV exposure, water hardness and air pollution.
“Multiple factors have a huge impact on your hair and scalp health,” Mussat said. “We can circumvent environmental factors with custom ingredients. One of these factors is pollution and air quality.”
"Experiential kind of experimentation": P&G steps into metaverse with BeautySPHERE platform
Q&A
P&G launched new digital platform BeautySPHERE at the CES trade show in January. CosmeticsDesign spoke with Alexis Schrimpf, Vice President of Design, Global Skin and Personal Care at P&G about what the platform is and how the metaverse plays into the company's future.
Tell me about what BeautySPHERE is.
BeautySPHERE is an experiential kind of experimentation, a digital world where people can engage with our brands, our products, our values, and they can learn about things like responsible beauty and what that means to us.
Virtual shopping and shopping for a virtual world: Orveon CEO thoughts on AI and tech in beauty
Q&A
Technology in beauty is not new, but in a world of virtual tools, augmented reality and virtual reality, new frontiers of commerce may be opening up. CosmeticsDesign spoke with Pascal Houdayer, CEO of Orveon, owner of bareMinerals, BUXOM, and Laura Mercier, about virtual tech in the beauty segment.
Generally, what's happening with AI in the beauty segment right now?
In beauty, on the whole, it's not just now. It has been a trend that has been here for more than 10 years, which is basically touching different things around the IoT, virtual reality and virtual try-on, which are now accelerating with crypto collectibles. The Metaverse has specific parallel realities of shopping.