The best beauty products are the ones that are proven to work. Inside one of the largest beauty research and consumer centers in the world, L'Oréal Groupe—an industry leader in haircare, skincare, fragrance, makeup, and augmented beauty—is taking science to a new level at their Research & Innovation Center in Clark, New Jersey. The goal? To innovate new serums, products and formulas for L'Oréal's consumers, a number that tops one billion globally.
The new facility brings teams, tools, and projects that were once spread across five buildings on L’Oréal's US campus together, allowing more than 600 researchers across scientific disciplines and beauty categories to work and collaborate under the same roof for the first time.
“L’Oréal has always been a science-first company,” says Barbara Lavernos, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, L'Oréal Groupe, in charge of Research, Innovation, and Technology. “L’Oréal was founded by a chemist in 1909 and our investment in the state-of-the-art R&I Center reinforces our commitment to leading beauty innovation.”
Around $160 million was invested to bring the 250,000-square-foot space to life, and to ensure its sustainability in the decades to come. An on-site 10,000-panel solar array powers 70% of the center’s energy needs at peak consumption.
What sets the site apart is its unique end-to-end innovation model, giving employees proximity to every stage–from upstream research to downstream development–including an on-site mini factory to scale final formulations before full production.
Stepping into the heart of the R&I Center, it would be easy to assume the labs and workstations are the kind of place where robotics engineers are testing actuators or studying environmental simulators (which, to be fair, is actively happening at L’Oréal).
Walking across the 26,000-square-foot, open-concept lab (it’s big enough to fit six professional-sized basketball courts inside), Christina Bishop, a Research & Innovation Director for haircare, pauses in front of one of many stations. This is the Instrumental Testing Facility. In this lab there are dozens of testing stations and devices—like specialized scales and a scanning electron microscope, which can magnify a 3D image of a single strand of hair so well that it no longer looks like a strand, but a rendering of a dragon’s back, full of ridges and scales. There is an extensive collection of hair samples—fine, wavy, course, bleached, coily, you name it. Behind her is an all-white machine with swatches of hair locked inside and a control panel with only a few buttons on it.
“This is our frizz chamber,” she says. “We regulate the temperature and the relative humidity to evaluate anti-frizz properties and frizz protection of our products while using a wide range of different hair types.” It’s here where claims like “Controls frizz for up to eight hours” are tested. In fact, all claims—for shine, smoothness, strength, and long wear—are all validated with instrumental tests, explains Bishop.
Tucked away from the Instrumental Testing Facility are the Stability Chambers. Monitored exposure to varying temperatures and conditions helps the team of L’Oréal scientists evaluate how quickly a product ages once it’s formulated, ensuring that products that make it to market have a shelf life minimum of three years.
The chambers shift between freezing and hot temperatures, mimicking shipping conditions in a shaking incubator to simulate products moving between air and ground transport across differing climates. Throughout every test, scientists measure changes in characteristics like viscosity and texture as they are exposed to different conditions.
Outside of the Instrumental Testing Facility, the Research and Innovation Center features an in-house salon, where products are tested by stylists on real people to see how well they perform. The consumer center allows up to 400 consumers to visit every day for hands-on product testing with employees, so feedback can be integrated in real time.
It’s a buzzing, busy place. But the focus is palpable. There are thousands of products in the facility at any given time because L’Oréal, a company known for submitting nearly 700 patents per year, is constantly developing and testing in all different categories and for many different innovations. For hair alone, at any given moment at least three to four products are being developed by each of the 17 iconic American brands under L’Oréal’s umbrella–part of a total portfolio of over 35 global brands. Add skincare, makeup, and fragrance, and this center is constantly humming with hundreds of products in shaking incubators and large-quantity batch formulators that keep the 600-plus innovators who work here busy and inspired.
That sort of team-minded inspiration is what motivated the layout of the Research Center. Other industry HQs and facilities aren’t designed with the same open-concept structure, which Bishop says helps foster the kind of partnerships that working in silos simply cannot. “In the Flex Lab, chemists have the ability to work at one bench one day and another bench another day. So sometimes a haircare chemist will batch formulations next to makeup chemists–an arrangement that strengthens interdisciplinary innovation."
Aside from next-generation tech that redefines the standards of formulation and testing for L’Oréal, Bishop credits the natural environment of collaboration and creativity for what sets the new R&I Center apart from the rest of the industry. “We are making the formulations, batching them, evaluating their stability, even evaluating their performance in one place. We can do all of that here,” she says. “But I think one of the most exciting things is not just the fact that we have everything all in one space, but also that we're so uniquely intertwined. That allows us to foster more collaboration.”
