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AUSTIN, Texas — Looking at meeting the diverse beauty care needs of consumers, L’Oréal has introduced its latest technological advancement, a personalized skin care service called SkinCeuticals CUSTOM D.O.S.E, at Fast Company’s Grill in Austin this past weekend.
Developed by L’Oréal’s Technology Incubator in partnership with L’Oréal-owned SkinCeuticals, a leader in advanced skincare, D.O.S.E is a state-of-the-art service engineered to scan and evaluate consumers’ unique skin needs and combine active ingredients into a tailor-made, corrective serum.
“At L’Oréal, we are poised to leverage technology to respond to the rising wave of consumer demand for personalized products and services,” said Guive Balooch, global vice president of the L’Oréal Technology Incubator.
“D.O.S.E acts like a mini skin care laboratory, combining lab grade formulation and factory grade manufacturing into a machine that sits on the counter. As we pursue our mission of beauty for all, we are inspired by the challenge of using technology and design to create innovative beauty experiences custom made for each consumer.”
The D.O.S.E technology is said to be the first-of-its-kind because it is able to mix active ingredients, chosen specifically to target the appearance of skin-aging issues, like wrinkles, fine lines, and discoloration, into a single serum. D.O.S.E has a production-quality compounder that operates at 1,200 rotations per minute to mix ingredients precisely, drop by drop. The machine uniquely combines active ingredients that historically were unmixable outside of a factory setting.
Through this technology, skin care professionals can administer a single D.O.S.E serum with multiple active ingredients that address the appearance of multiple skin concerns. More than 250 unique skin types were considered when researching and selecting active ingredients to include in D.O.S.E in order to provide dozens of combinations through over 2,000 algorithms. L’Oréal scientists spent 12 months determining what formulations would be most efficacious based on consumer needs and ensured the technology could dispense the formula accurately.
The D.O.S.E experience begins with a one-on-one skin care professional consultation to discuss which active ingredients will be most appropriate for the patient. The skincare professional completes an assessment on a tablet, which transfers the data to the D.O.S.E machine that mixes and dispenses the customized serum. A custom label is then printed for each consumer, including an expiration date and a bar code for easy reordering.
“Our customers are consistently concerned with skin-aging and discoloration, among various skin conditions that require a personalized approach to address them,” said Christina Fair, general manager of SkinCeuticals. “The D.O.S.E technology empowers skincare professionals to co-create personalized formulas that address patients’ unique skincare needs on the spot, in minutes. We’ve created a better ecosystem for them to offer enhanced experiences for their patients using technology to address specific skin concerns.”
In addition to CUSTOM D.O.S.E, L’Oréal offers Lancôme’s Le Teint Particulier, a custom-blended foundation experience. The service begins as a Beauty Advisor scans a client’s skin tone using a colorimeter. The consumer data is processed through a unique algorithm that measures skin tones amongst 8,000 different shades with pinpoint accuracy. The client then chooses from three levels of coverage – sheer, medium and full — and three levels of moisture, providing customization with 72,000 possibilities. Within minutes, the made to measure formula is blended at the counter and the client’s shade number is printed on the bottle for easy reference upon refill.
L’Oréal also showcased L’Oréal Professionnel’s Style My Hair app, a real-time 3D hair color try-on service. The haircare brand worked with augmented reality expert Modiface, to create a live video that accurately identifies users’ unique hair and facial features. When these individual features are recognized, the app offers a variety of hair colors from L’Oréal Professionnel for the user to virtually try-on. To develop the accuracy of Style My Hair, Modiface manually annotated 22,000 facial images to ensure the most realistic, personalized try-on experience possible. Released in January 2018, it’s currently available on android and iOS.
This summer, CUSTOM D.O.S.E will be available in select U.S. physician offices nationwide.
