AI and cosmetics: transforming the beauty experience thanks to large-scale personalization

The group wanted to enhance their approach to beauty personalization with an AI capable not only of describing, but also of prescribing. The group had just acquired a start-up specialized in facial analysis, whose algorithm detected skin characteristics but struggled to deliver pertinent recommendations. There were several challenges to overcome:

• Moving from diagnosis to prescription, by giving the result meaning and value
• Articulating science and marketing in a coherent approach between brands
• Creating a universal personalization model while respecting the specific identities of each brand

Ekimetrics designed a beauty prescription AI: a system capable of acting and thinking like a dermatologist, basing it on business rules co-created with the group’s scientists and marketers via:

1. Knowledge engineering: Extensive work was carried out brand by brand, to formalize the expert knowledge: Which ingredients act on which symptoms? Which combinations are to be avoided? This codification enabled the creation of a  knowledge base of explainable, accessible business intelligence.

2. Interpretability and transparency: Unlike opaque deep learning models, Ekimetrics favored transparent decision trees, enabling each recommendation to be explained to the consumer: why this product, why this ingredient, and how it meets your needs.

3. Alignment between science and business: The algorithm integrated business weightings to reconcile scientific rigor and brand consistency (positioning, textures, price ranges). The objective: to prescribe the most relevant product and ensure that each category of consumers discovers an experience that meets their expectations and their brand universe.

From the first deployment phases, the solution profoundly transformed the way the group approached beauty personalization by laying the groundwork for a new technological and experiential standard on an international scale. Created from the outset to be omnichannel, it links the digital and physical experiences in a unified beauty journey. This has allowed:

• A large-scale international deployment, first launched on a dermatological skincare brand, then extended to more than 10 brands and more than 50 markets across the world.
• A redesigned, smarter, and more expert customer experience: a selfie, a few questions, a precise diagnosis, and a reasoned beauty prescription, massively adopted online and at points of sale.
• Sustainable business impact, with a new acquisition channel based on expert personalization, a measured increase in customer satisfaction, and strengthened scientific credibility for the group’s brands.
• An increased technological autonomy, thanks to the full internalization of the solution by the teams, ensuring its longevity and its capacity to evolve.