Beauty secret

29.03.2016 L'Oréal : Inclusive Beauty : Big Data Beauty
The Spectrum by RAIN for L'oréal, US

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.

The Big Picture

L’Oréal is just one of many beauty brands that has realised it must cater for a greater range of women. For more, see our Inclusive Beauty market report.

You have 2 free News articles remaining. Sign up to LS:N Global to get unlimited access to all articles.
Discover Our Memberships Sign in

What do we use cookies for?

We use cookies to enable the use of our platform’s paid features and to analyse our traffic. No personal data, including your IP address, is stored and we do not sell data to third parties.

Learn more