CLARK, N.J. — Guive Balooch has seen the future of beauty and it’s a smartphone. As global vice president for L’Oreal’s Technology Incubator, a 26 – person team that operates like a start up within one of the world’s largest cosmetics companies. Mr. Balooch partners with academics and entrepreneurs to make products on the forefront of the $438 billion global beauty industry.
“Everything starts with this pillar in my mind of where beauty and technology meet,” Mr. Balooch said while touring the New Jersey facility that houses the incubator’s first lab, founded in 2012. (San Francisco, Paris and Tokyo are home to additional labs.)
Since the incubator opened, Mr. Balooch has overseen the development of five products — a mix of wearables, objects and apps — that further his vision of a future in which cosmetics are connected, customized and designed to meet each consumer’s needs.
Take his team’s latest invention: the Kérastase Hair Coach Powered by Withings. Introduced in early January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the sleek silver hairbrush — the product of a three-way partnership of the incubator, the smart technology maker Withings and Kérastase, L’Oréal’s luxury hair-care brand — is described as the world’s first smart brush.
“More than 50 percent of Google searches today in beauty are about hair,” Mr. Balooch explained.
The device aims to banish bad hair days by offering technical insights into the state of the user’s locks, plus personalized advice on how best to care for them.
Scheduled to go on sale this year, the $179 brush contains a conductivity sensor that knows whether hair is wet or dry; an accelerometer and gyroscope to measure the speed and force of brush strokes; a microphone that captures auditory data; and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity to upload all that information to an app, which uses an algorithm to analyze the statistics and detect breakage. And, oh yeah — the bristles feel pretty good, too.
“It was very important for us to make a high-end device that, taking all the technology and sophisticated aspects away, is the best brush you’ll ever see,” said Cédric Hutchings, chief executive of Withings and vice president for digital health at Nokia, which developed the hardware.
Mr. Balooch said the brush uses a combination of synthetic fibers “that mimic $200 to $300 brushes on the market.”
It’s a category he knows well. In 2007, after earning a doctorate in biomaterials from the University of California, San Francisco, and following postdoctoral studies in cell biomechanics at Stanford, he took a job with L’Oréal in Chicago, where he was challenged to “understand the physics of hair,” he said.
“I would take hairs of ethnic descent and I would test relaxers on them, shampoos, conditioners, then I would break the hairs on a machine,” he said.
Mr. Balooch’s work impressed the L’Oréal brass, who in 2008 asked him to join the company’s research and innovation team, and build relationships with start-ups and universities. When the incubator was formed five years ago, he was “the right man for the job,” said Mr. Balooch’s manager, Stephan Habif, senior vice president for L’Oréal’s research and innovation arm in the Americas. “This is L’Oréal — we believe in entrepreneurship.”
That may explain why the incubator is staffed by men and women who share Mr. Balooch’s academia-meets-Silicon Valley background.