L’Oréal Alphabet-owned Verily announced a strategic partnership, exclusive in beauty, to advance skin health. The first-of-its-kind partnership in the beauty industry is expected to entail two programs aimed to better understand and characterize skin and hair aging mechanisms and to inform L’Oréal’s precision beauty tech strategy and product development.
Why does it matter?
The first is a strategic research collaboration to establish a longitudinal biological, clinical, environmental view of skin health. It combines L’Oréal’s deep scientific knowledge of skin and Verily’s comprehensive clinical science capabilities, to decode and discover the links between exposome, skin aging, and deep biology of the skin.
The second is a partnership with Verily’s R&D Team and L’Oréal’s Active Cosmetics Division, to explore the development of new technologies and tele-diagnosis solutions such as sensors, and AI algorithms for dermatology and skincare, that can form the basis for new services.
On the record
“We are excited to partner with Verily, a world leader in precision health tech. L’Oréal’s century-long commitment to pioneering innovation has come from our strong belief in the intersection between science, formulations, and our unique Advanced Research capabilities to decode revolutionary scientific discoveries that will create the future of beauty” says Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO of L’Oréal Group. “Thanks to this partnership, we want to lead a new era of skin health, through tech and science, to enable every person around the world the most inclusive, personalized, powerful and precise programs for their skin at each stage of their lives.”
“Verily and L’Oréal believe in the transformative power of technology to enable precision beauty and health” says Stephen Gillett, President and COO, Verily. “We are pleased to partner with a world leader in cosmetic science to better understand and promote skin health.”
The context
This is just one of many partnerships Verily has struck with companies throughout the wider healthcare space. However, Google’s health division has yet to turn to profit. Then again, we know Alphabet is in this for the long haul with Google’s search business bringing it a pile of money to finance all of the experiments they could think of.
Nevertheless, we are looking forward to seeing what Verily and L’Oréal can come up with. As soon as we hear something new from them, we’ll get back to you.