L’Oréal opens Global Hair Research Centre in Paris

French beauty care and cosmetics offering company L’Oréal has opened its Global Hair Research Centre in Paris Saint-Ouen with its Research & Innovation programmes (R&I) dedicated to the haircare profession comprising hair colouring, shampoos, styling sprays, perms and smoothing or straightening.

The company has invested €100m for the 25,000m² centre which will be the head of a global network of six R&I regional centres and headquarters for International Departments in hair colour, hair care and hair styling.

L’Oréal chairman and CEO Jean-Paul Agon said that the centre exemplifies the firm’s strategy that aims to make beauty universal based on a deep understanding of consumers’ needs and aspirations to offer products that match women’s and men’s different cultures, beauty routines and purchasing power.

The new centre will host 500 employees including chemists, physico-chemists, opticians, materials scientists, metrologists, rheologists, computer scientists and statisticians.

Architecture and amenities of the new centre have been designed to develop collaborative spaces that are helpful to share and transfer skills along with Research Centre offering specialists future methods and tools.

L’Oréal said that to support innovation flow, the effective tools help researchers to explore science of formulation and evaluation offered endless points.

The department heads across the regional centres located in Japan, China, India, US, Brazil and in Saint-Ouen for Europe work to define innovation strategy for each hair treatment type globally and manage the worldwide innovation portfolio, the company said.

Each of the R&I centres have a dual mission to interpret innovation strategies identified by the Saint Ouen Research Centre and tailor them to market specific features along with inventing new products to meet consumer’ needs of that local area.

The company claims that the local innovations also could be internationalised via a ‘reverse innovation’ deployment process.