Beauty secret

US – Eager to show the science behind their brand, L’Oréal USA created a short film featuring chemist Balanda Atis.

• Atis explains L’Oréal’s work on creating more pigments for darker skinned women
• The company collected skin tone measurements from 57 countries and 20,000 data points

The film, The Spectrum, begins with Atis explaining the problem of finding make-up for non-Caucasian skin – that often there are only two or three shades available. So Atis and her team gathered data and documented different skin tones and then analysed the information in the lab to understand the colours within them. They discovered that to match the darker colour of a woman’s skin, they didn’t need a darker pigment but a deeper one, which they eventually found in the pigment ultramarine blue.

From this research, L’Oréal opened its first Women of Color Lab in 2014, and created a greater range of foundation shades. But as Atis says: ‘With each baby, a new skin tone is born, and with that we know our work is never done.’ The Spectrum celebrates the brand’s strides towards improvement and its focus on a beautiful pursuit.