PARIS — L’Oréal has expanded its partnership with Nvidia to create a beauty and skin care AI engine allowing for new, rapid formulation discovery.
L’Oréal has a strong internal knowledge and database on skin and hair biology — over 1 terabyte of data within the group, which counts 4,000 scientists.
“We need partners outside that can help us with AI platforms,” said Guive Balooch, global vice president of tech and open innovation at L’Oréal. Such collaborators can use the group’s expertise to help target new molecules faster.
Already L’Oréal has worked with companies such as Chinese start-up Veminsyn and San Diego-based Debut. “We want to more and more develop the infrastructure to do that within the labs,” Balooch said. “This is where we’re starting partnerships with people like Nvidia.”
In June 2025, L’Oréal and Nvidia announced they would collaborate on bringing next-generation AI to beauty. Through the tie-in, L’Oréal and its partner ecosystem planned to leverage the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform for speedy development and deployment of AI. The first focus was on digital and marketing, involving new and 3D designs for packaging and products, which could be done in a creative way at speed.
“Now what we want is to be able to embed that in our R&I to be able to find and discover the next molecules faster than ever before,” Balooch said. “We live at a pace now where the biologists and chemists no longer need to be at the [lab] bench only. It’s a combination of the bench plus computational biology.”
L’Oréal has three overarching goals for AI when it comes to R&I: understanding consumer needs, molecular discoveries and designing formulation.
On Tuesday, L’Oréal revealed the expanded AI partnership with Nvidia aims to accelerate and redefine beauty innovation through AI-driven computational chemistry. The Nvidia Alchemi machine learning framework has been integrated into L’Oréal’s research-and-innovation ecosystem to develop the AI engine.
“Think of Alchemi as a collection of domain-specific pre-trained models that Nvidia has trained with quantum chemistry data,” said Azita Martin, vice president and general manager of AI for retail and consumer packaged goods at Nvidia.
Additionally, the company has a set of tools that carry out simulation. All these combined can quicken the discovery of new chemicals and materials.
L’Oréal headquarters.
Courtesy of L’Oréal
“What we are doing with Nvidia is based on our proprietary molecules to look at formulation at an atomic level,” said Matthieu Cassier, global vice president of transformation and digital at L’Oréal R&I.
L’Oréal can simulate ingredient performance and texture virtually, allowing for the group’s scientists to test thousands of variables at the same time. The discovery process therefore becomes 100-times faster than in the past, enabling a more agile innovation method maximizing the company’s potential for its proprietary active ingredients for skin care.
Specifically at this stage, the focus is on photoprotection and skin tone management, for highly advanced and scientifically precise beauty solutions.
Photoprotection has been among the most complex formulas to develop. “It’s a cosmetic category, but it’s also very close to the health Beauty Features,” Cassier said. “You have your proprietary molecules. We are designing some filters that are quite unique. Then you want to reach the right cost for your consumer, the right sensoriality.”
Quality and safety are other key parameters. If you look at a photoprotection formula, there’s generally between 20 and 30 raw materials and more than 100 possible combinations for them. So finding the right combination is a massive job.
“AI combined with the right expertise might take you to some path you would never have thought about, which is where the discovery happens,” Cassier said.
The first fruit of L’Oréal and Nvidia’s expanded partnership is expected to come to market in one to two years.
“Our collaboration with Nvidia brings definitively a new dimension into our L’Oréal Research labs”, said Barbara Lavernos, deputy chief executive officer in charge of research, innovation and technology at L’Oréal, in a statement. “By applying AI-powered molecular simulation to our most proprietary actives, we are bridging atomic-scale discovery with real-world consumer benefit — accelerating the development of more effective, more sensorial and accessible products for consumers around the world.”
The new predictive formulation science was presented Tuesday at the Nvidia GTC AI Conference in San Jose, Calif.
“We know that this is going to really change the way that we innovate internally and externally,” Balooch said.
