L’Oréal and IBM Partner to Develop AI Models to Formulate More Sustainable Cosmetics

The global beauty giant announced a collaboration with IBM to use its generative AI technology to guide cosmetics formulation teams to make more sustainable choices.

L’Oréal hopes to use IBM’s generative AI (GenAI) technology and expertise to uncover new insights in cosmetics formulation data. Their goal is to promote the use of sustainable raw materials that require less energy and produce less waste.

“To protect the planet’s natural resources, it is essential to explore renewable, sustainably sourced raw materials when developing consumer products,” L’Oréal said in a press release.

This unique collaboration aims to develop a customized AI base model designed to significantly increase the processing power of L’Oréal’s Research and Innovation teams in every cosmetics category and every region of the world.

The creation of this AI model will leverage a large number of formulation and ingredient data points to accelerate multiple tasks performed by L’Oréal, including the formulation of new products, reformulation of existing cosmetics, and optimization of scaled-up production.

The base model is trained on a large amount of unlabeled data, capable of performing a variety of tasks and applying information from one situation to another. First applied in the field of natural language processing (NLP), these models are now being applied to areas such as chemistry, time series and geospatial modalities.

L’Oréal says the formulation-based models developed with IBM are a first for the cosmetics industry.

L’Oréal hopes the tool will help its researchers better understand the behavior of renewable ingredients in cosmetic formulations, thereby achieving its goal of basing most product formulations on bio-sourced materials and/or circular economy sourcing by 2030.

Stéphane Ortiz, head of innovative processes and product development at L’Oréal Research and Innovation, said: “As part of our digital transformation plan, this collaboration will expand the speed and scale of our innovation and formulation processes, so that products always meet higher standards of inclusivity, sustainability and personalization. "