L’Oréal has signed a partnership with Verily, a precision health company, to push the boundaries of skin health.Their collaboration should involve two programs, including a longitudinal study.
The companies’exclusive collaboration in beauty is expected to involve two programs created to better understand and characterize the mechanisms of skin and hair aging. Learnings from that are, in turn, to inform L’Oréal’s precision beauty tech strategy and product development.
“There are some avenues in beauty that require unique partnerships for us to have more and more knowledge to be able to get to the next product and service that might come,” explained Guive Balooch, global vice president of L’Oréal technology incubator.
Verily, an Alphabet company that aims to improve health at the confluence of health care, data science and technology-building integrated solutions, is best in class in precision medicine, according to the executive.
Verily declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but described it as a “strategic research collaboration that has been ongoing for many years.”
“One of those real challenges that we have today is in skin care,” continued Balooch.“What’s really inspiring us for the future is precision medicine. In the medical field, in the health field, there will be a moment very soon — in the next three to five years, maybe even sooner — where we will be having a lot of precise prescriptions for our health that are based on our data, on who we are, on how we react to different medications and things like that,” he said. “What will happen is that we will need some understanding of the biology of skin, of how we can have the right link between biomarkers and what’s underneath the skin to help us give to people more precise routines and programs for their skincare and also to adapt it over time.”
The L’Oréal’s partnership with Verily is also to build a platform for dermatologists and patients that allows dermatologists to obtain data from people in between medical visits to empower doctors with information that can then help them give more precise recommendations over time. It is, in other words, a tele-diagnostic platform.
The platform would be data-driven through algorithms co-created with the teams at L’Oréal and ModiFace, the group’s provider of augmented reality and artificial intelligence technology, alongside Verily’s research-and-development team. The platform will be co-created also with the 200,000 dermatologists linked to L’Oréal’s Active Cosmetics division.
“The ultimate goal is to build an entire skin-aging platform,” said Balooch, of the ecosystem for skin management that he explained should be seamless. It could include sensors or people taking photos of their skin, faces and products, for instance.
The platform, through which L’Oréal and Verily can bring services through dermatologists to consumers, should be available in the next two years.
