L’Oréal Inaugurates Global Hair Research Center

L’Oreal has inaugurated its Global Hair Research Centre located in Paris Saint-Ouen. The Center’s Research & Innovation (R&I) programs are exclusively dedicated to the hair care profession which includes hair coloring, hair care (shampoos, conditioners), styling, (sprays, gels, waxes) and perms, smoothing or straightening, according to the beauty giant.

The 100-million-euro investment is one of the of the largest investments in L’Oréal’s R&I history. The center hosts 500 employees, including chemists, physico-chemists, opticians, materials scientists, metrologists, rheologists, computer scientists and statisticians.

To support the innovation flow, ambitious and effective tools allow researchers to explore more broadly the endless possibilities offered by the science of formulation and evaluation. For example, robots mimic product applications on hair or prepare time-saving formulae. Thus to date the automatic weighing robot has weighed nearly one million coloring samples for approximately 100,000 formulae that require testing, according to the company.

Original numerical modelling tools using already acquired data, evaluate virtual formulae so that only those most likely to meet consumer needs are to be developed.

Besides their scientifically proven technical efficacy, products also generate emotions. To measure the emotional components of product performance, this Research Center has developed sensory evaluation expertise carried out by fifty expert technicians and established procedures which monitor consumers’ actions and record their feelings, said L’Oréal.

All the information thus collected in this Global Centre and the six regional centers, is fed back into the hair innovation processes.

The Saint Ouen Research Centrer is the head of a global network of six R&I regional centers, which are located in Japan, China, India, USA, Brazil and in Saint-Ouen for Europe.

The six regional hair centres also have a dual mission: interpreting the innovation strategies identified by the Saint Ouen Research Centre and tailoring them to the specific features of their markets as well as inventing new products that meet local consumers’ needs. These local innovations may also be internationalized via a “reverse innovation” deployment process, according to L’Oréal.