L’Oréal Group bets on longevity with new skin age calculator

2025 has already been hailed as the year consumers will be obsessed with living — and looking younger — for longer. L’Oréal Group is leaning in with its latest innovation, a tool that promises to determine the skin’s rate of ageing. It signals a shift across the industry towards offering personalised data and tracking as part of everyday beauty routines.

“It’s like wearables, but for your skin,” says Vania Lacascade, the group’s chief innovation officer. “Imagine getting your blood analysed — but instead, it’s your skin, at the cellular level, in minutes.”

Using “lab-on-chip” technology, developed with Korean biotech innovator Nanoentek, the Cell Bioprint tool can analyse a customer’s skin cells to predict their responsiveness to ingredients like retinol and detect potential issues such as acne before they emerge, according to L’Oréal.

The tool will be unveiled during tech showcase CES in Las Vegas, which runs from 7 to 10 January, with the first of the group’s brands to introduce the tech to beauty counters and retailers this year, starting in Asia.

Lacascade says longevity will be a large focus for the group this year, as living longer becomes a bigger part of wellness and luxury. “There’s a new mindset among consumers. It’s the desire to age well and it goes beyond addressing the visible signs of ageing but deep diving into the root cause at the cellular, molecular level. The new era means we need to change our approach to product innovation because what we are trying to decipher is the mechanism of biological ageing,” she says.

She hopes the data collected from the skin analysis will pioneer a new era of skincare for the conglomerate. “The next generation will go beyond surface-level ageing and help us act on the multiple ageing markers within the cells.”