Barbara Lavernos may have been at L’Oréal for 34 years, but she has never seen such radical shifts in the beauty industry as there are currently.
“The last years have been accelerating in terms of change like never before. Exponentially,” Lavernos, a trained engineer and chemist, who is now L’Oréal’s deputy chief executive officer, said at the 2025 WWD Beauty Inc Catalysts conference earlier this month, in conversation with Beauty Inc editor in chief Jenny B. Fine.
In regard to the consumer, they’re more educated and knowledgable about beauty than ever. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “We don’t have to teach them anything. They know so much.”
At the same time, there are now no beauty archetypes for these consumers, a fact that Lavernos loves.
“Some decades ago, there was one archetype: The beautiful lady of 30 years old, or the one of 40 years old that everybody on earth wanted to look like. Today, it’s the opposite,” she continued. “We are celebrating each individual beauty. This is a big, big shift, because when you are a manufacturer of beauty, it’s more difficult — more stimulating also — to please all these differences.”
Big biological changes are at play, too. “Humankind today is really accelerating in changes because in 2040, two-thirds of humankind will have melanin-rich skin or a dark-hair base,” Lavernos said. “Two billion people in 2045 will be above 60 years old. You have so many shifts when it comes to consumers.”
The second radical shift she has experienced is the go-to-market time frame.
“Thirty-four years ago, you go to a physical shop, and that was the only way you have different types of point of sale,” she said. “Today, not only do you have e-commerce, but now you have quick commerce. I just came back from India, and you deliver within 15 minutes. There’s also agentic commerce. You’re speaking to an agent working for you. So the market has changed radically. And then the technology and the science have changed so much. Two revolutions are happening now.”
The final big change Lavernos brought up was climate and environmental pressures moving the world toward sustainability. “The world has never changed as much in such a magnitude, and with so many parameters changing at the same moment,” she said.
It is for these aforementioned reasons that Lavernos created a framework to deal with all of this change, called the Four Ps theory.
“At the end of the day, you need to take into account all those changes and to look through the four P lenses: what is possible, what is plausible, what is probable and what is preferable? The fourth one is the most difficult, because there is so much change.…At L’Oréal we are embracing all those changes. We are welcoming all those changes,” she said.
Turning the conversation to a fifth P — personalization — Lavernos described it as the convergence between a societal shift and a biological, technical and scientific reality.
“Personalization is about: ‘I don’t want to mimic an archetype. I want to be myself.’ So that’s a social shift. I want to be myself, whatever my gender, whatever my origin, whatever my novel orientation, whatever my age. And even more: ‘I want to be personalized through my journey’…It’s an evolution,” she said.
In terms of biology, Lavernos spoke about how everyone’s biological makeup is different. With that, science and technology are able to go much deeper when examining skin, for example.
“I can diagnose your specific microbiome thanks to AI and augmented imaging,” she explained. “I can go underneath your skin, to see underneath at molecular, at cell and at tissue level, the health and the aging of your own skin.”
This is starting to show up at the retail level.
“This biological decoding underneath your skin, it was possible 10 years ago, five years ago, but you had to go to labs. You had to do a blood test or a sample. You had to wait for a week or whatever,” Lavernos said. “Today at L’Oréal, we have the lab on a chip in which in five minutes, you have your biomarkers decoding, which is so important, because then you could be advised on one of the best products for you.”
On where beauty ends and medicine begins, she stressed that lines are fundamentally blurring.
“The main difference is that beauty is under the cosmetic regulatory and drug and pharma is under health regulatory, so you have a huge difference related to the way they operate, but it’s true that they’re very much blurring nowadays,” Lavernos said.
When it comes to longevity, she believes skin is key.
“I know it’s a buzzword. Everybody is talking about longevity, but take it like it is,” she said. “Skin is the the largest organ and is both a barrier, but also a storyteller. Your skin, through its biomarkers, is telling the story of your inner body, because the skin is in dialogue with each and every one of your organs. We are working with neuroscientists who are close to explaining that Alzheimer’s disease could be discovered thanks to one of the biomarkers on your skin. So you see the convergence between beauty, the skin science, and the health management and the pharma industry.
“We are working [on being able] to intercept underneath your skin, once again, the aging messages of your proteins and freeze or maybe reverse them, and soon you will see some of the first launches about longevity,” Lavernos continued.
And while the industry is radically transforming, L’Oréal has been radically transforming, as well.
“The company transformation we are all experiencing is unbelievable, because transformation has become the new normal,” said Lavernos. “I remember that time when the CEO came to his or her employees and said: ‘OK, we will have that program for the next three, five years.’ Sounds weird today or middle aged, because transformation has become an ongoing way to adapt and to cope with the tech revolutions, the science revolutions, the consumers’ new expectations, so it’s quite difficult to succeed.
“I’m sharing some ideas in a very humble way, not to say that L’Oréal is doing everything perfectly,” she added. “It’s a journey, but for me, whatever the transformation — and today’s world is really undergoing so much change — stick to your core values.”
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