What’s coming next? Forecasting the future of tech-based beauty
We spoke to three Europe-based industry analysts to learn how technology could shape the beauty industry landscape in the upcoming years.
Canvas 8’s beauty expert Anita Bhagwandas said there is likely to be more bespoke product offerings and deeper product discovery, while Global Beauty Director at Kantar, Ashley Kang, said businesses will start to target ‘moments’ rather than consumer cohorts and that there is likely to be a switch to tech-powered professional treatments.
Growth of connected beauty and the use of IoT technology was a prediction from Associate Analyst at GlobalData, Sophie Mitchell, who also shared that while many beauty businesses had been investing in the Metaverse this year, she wasn’t so convinced of its great importance for the industry.
What’s coming next? Forecasting the future of tech-based beauty
We spoke to three Europe-based industry analysts to learn how technology could shape the beauty industry landscape in the upcoming years.
Canvas 8’s beauty expert Anita Bhagwandas said there is likely to be more bespoke product offerings and deeper product discovery, while Global Beauty Director at Kantar, Ashley Kang, said businesses will start to target ‘moments’ rather than consumer cohorts and that there is likely to be a switch to tech-powered professional treatments.
Growth of connected beauty and the use of IoT technology was a prediction from Associate Analyst at GlobalData, Sophie Mitchell, who also shared that while many beauty businesses had been investing in the Metaverse this year, she wasn’t so convinced of its great importance for the industry.
10 beauty tech innovations to watch
The technology available to serve the beauty and personal care industry is changing at lightning speed.
Back in November, we rounded up some game-changing innovations we had seen – whether they were disrupting the product development process, overhauling ingredients testing, or giving consumers new levels of personalisation at the retail stage.
Some of the highlights included AI to support the R&D process for beauty businesses, a testing solution that eliminates the need for in vivo testing on animals and at-home and professional-use tech to test skin and hair condition for ultra-personalised solutions.
Potential to revolutionise the production of natural ingredients
French-American biotech startup Interstellar Lab started to deploy its biofarming platform, BioPod, which fuses cutting-edge hardware with AI-enabled control and science to create ‘high-precision botanicals’ for use by the cosmetics industry.
The startup is backed by L'Oréal’s Green Sciences Incubator, which aims to support companies that are working towards finding new solutions for the environmental challenges the planet is facing.
We spoke to Interstellar Lab’s CEO Barbara Belvisi, who said the autonomous cocoon is “a terrestrial adaptation of a system originally developed for NASA, operates in a semi-closed circuit, optimising the water cycle and capturing ambient CO2.”
Belvisi said the BioPod will be deployed in the first semester of 2024 and that potentially 10 more could be installed by the end of 2025.
Grasse-based natural and raw materials fragrances and flavours company Robertet was the first company to acquire a BioPod in late September.
The increased pressures to quickly get new products on the market, combined with never-ending regulations changes and demand for sustainability transparency throughout the supply chain, means that many R&D professionals are working longer hours to meet these needs.
Of course, there’s a lot to consider when creating a new beauty or personal care product. You need inventiveness in terms of product claims, composition and application properties, balanced out with the assurances of repeatable manufacturing, product stability, microbiological purity/safety of the product application, along with ensuring there's evidence of the claimed effect.
We looked at the plethora of tech solutions have recently launched to assist R&D experts in their role...
The robots in marketing: using generative AI in content strategy
Responsible use of AI held the spotlight at the AI Safety Summit, which took place in November in the UK.
In a bid to show a collaborative attitude towards addressing the potential risks of AI, 28 countries signed the ‘Bletchley declaration’, which stated that: “Substantial risks may arise from potential intentional misuse or unintended issues of control relating to alignment with human intent. These issues are in part because those capabilities are not fully understood and are therefore hard to predict.”
However, when used to complement human expertise, there are still many opportunities for beauty and personal care brands to use generative tools like Chat GPT and Dall.E 3 for ideation, content perfection, or simply to add a slice of avant-garde fun and surrealism to campaigns.
Start the week with a startup: Haut AI
We’ve been following some of the most innovative startups that are aiming to disrupt the industry and one that really stood out was Estonian startup Haut AI.
In May 2023, Haut AI began to pilot SkinGPT, a virtual skincare try-on that enables image-to-image simulation of any skin condition using clinical claims.
The product, which is currently being tested out with a selected number of companies, uses cutting-edge AI to create synthetic images and apply skin conditions to input image data, so users can realistically view how their skin will change over time when they use certain skincare products.
We spoke to CEO Anastasia Georgievskaya about her future plans, the challenges faced along the way, and how the company’s technology means there potentially won’t be a place for non-efficacious products in the future.
Surviving beauty retail in 2024
In recent years, technology has transformed the way beauty products are sold to meet consumers’ ever-increasing demands for personalised products and experiences, as well as on-demand services.
According to Sampo Parkkinen, CEO of Finnish-American personalised digital brand experience company Revieve, beauty retailers’ future success will be intrinsically tied to their ability to embrace technology.
We spoke to Revieve about some key learnings from its in-depth beauty tech retail report for next year and beyond…
