Is AI the Future of Beauty?

Some Saw This Coming

If ELC's latest move shows where the industry is heading, Sephora offers a useful glimpse at how it got here. The beauty retailer began experimenting with AI and augmented reality well before ChatGPT entered everyday conversation. In 2016, it launched Sephora Virtual Artist, developed with ModiFace, allowing customers to virtually try on make-up using facial tracking and skin-tone analysis. It also introduced a Facebook Messenger booking assistant and started experimenting with AI-generated SEO landing pages designed around specific customer searches.

The significance of Sephora's approach was that these weren't isolated technology experiments. They were designed around a very traditional retail question: how can we make it easier for someone to find the right product and ultimately buy it? Virtual try-on addressed one of beauty's biggest online problems – not being able to physically test a shade. Personalised recommendations tackled the sheer number of products available. The booking assistant reduced the friction involved in arranging an in-store appointment. The technology was effectively being used to recreate some of the assistance consumers traditionally received from a beauty adviser.

That idea has become increasingly relevant as the number of products available to consumers has exploded. The problem isn't necessarily finding a cleanser, foundation or serum anymore. It's working out which one is right for you. AI is well suited to that problem because it can process multiple pieces of information simultaneously – skin type, concerns, preferences, previous purchases, price point and ingredients – and turn them into a recommendation. The next stage is therefore less about asking AI to identify a product and more about asking it to understand the person buying it.

Part Of The Business, Not Just The Customer Experience

The consumer-facing side of AI is perhaps the easiest to see, but some of the biggest changes are happening behind the scenes. ELC's recent expansion of its technology leadership shows AI is becoming part of wider business transformation – from accelerating AI-enabled processes to changing how teams work.

The same shift is happening in research and development. L'Oréal is using AI and predictive science to accelerate beauty discovery, including through its partnership with NVIDIA, while its work with OpenAI is exploring applications across product discovery, skin science and the skin microbiome.

The potential benefit is speed. AI can help scientists analyse vast numbers of ingredients and formulations, identify the most promising possibilities and reduce the time it takes to move from an idea to a finished product. It doesn't replace the scientist; it gives them a much bigger toolkit.

It’s also something smaller beauty founders are using to their advantage, not just in product development but also in team dynamics. “The biggest shift was making AI my team's best tool, not just mine” explains Fabienne Sebaoun, founder of Mimétique. “We use Claude as our assistant and Cowork for the heavy tasks and to get more out of the tools we already rely on, like Notion. What's also made a big difference is using AI as a shared knowledge base. Our scientific tests and product data are built into it, so whoever picks it up – whether for an ad, a newsletter or a formulation – starts from exactly the same source. AI absorbs the heavy, invisible work: sorting research, first drafts and formatting. So my team spends its energy where humans win – taste, creativity and human connection.”

What Happens To The Creative Industry?

Beauty is an extraordinarily visual business, so its creative industries are among the areas most obviously being affected by AI. Campaigns, product photography, social content and advertising can now be generated and adapted in a fraction of the time – and at a much lower cost.

For brands, the appeal is clear. But the question isn't simply whether AI will replace creative jobs; it's what happens when content becomes almost limitless. If every brand can produce hundreds of images a day, generating more content won't necessarily make a brand more distinctive. In fact, it could make creativity and taste more valuable. “One of the biggest benefits of AI is the ability to process large amounts of information and insight quickly,” explains Grace. “In trend forecasting, that means less time spent manually gathering and analysing data, and more time focused on understanding the cultural shifts behind those trends and building relationships with emerging brands and founders.”

Ultimately, someone still needs to decide whether an idea is interesting, whether it feels right for a brand and whether it has something meaningful to say. Those are harder things to automate. “On formulation, I tried using AI, and it simply doesn't have the lived experience,” agrees Fabienne. “You have to feed it constantly to keep it current, so it's too early to be 100% positive. Product development still needs a human at the controls.”

There is also the question of authenticity. Beauty has always sold an idealised version of reality but as AI-generated faces, products and environments become harder to distinguish from real ones, brands may need to be clearer about how technology is being used. The irony is that the easier it becomes to manufacture perfection, the more valuable something that feels genuinely human could become.

What AI Can't Replace

For all the talk about automation, some parts of beauty remain difficult to digitise: human judgement, expertise and experience. A make-up artist knows how a product behaves on different skin; a facialist can spot a change an algorithm might miss; a beauty editor can explain why one product genuinely performs better than another.

There is also an emotional side to beauty that technology can't easily replicate. We don't always buy something because an algorithm says it's right for us – sometimes it's the texture, packaging, recommendation from a friend or simply the ritual of using it. Grace agrees: “Whilst AI has a role to play in helping us achieve that, the trust we've built over more than 175 years comes from people, expertise and human connection, and that's something technology can enhance but not replace.” This is something Ruth echoes too: “The dream is not to replace people but to allow the brilliant people we have more time to be creative. We’ve freed the team from a lot of repetitive and time-consuming work that can be delivered efficiently with AI support in the background.”

To that end, AI could take on more of the repetitive, data-heavy work, allowing people to focus on creativity, expertise and relationships. “The brands that will get AI right are the ones that use it behind the scenes to become smarter, while becoming even more human in front of the customer. AI can help us understand information, work faster and hopefully make better decisions, but it can’t replace taste, instinct, empathy or relationships,” says Suzanne.

Overall, AI’s biggest impact may be less visible: sitting between consumers and the industry, influencing what we discover, buy and ultimately expect from beauty. The question is no longer whether AI will change beauty. It's how much of the industry will change before we even notice.