Guive Balooch isn't a name that rolls easily off an Australian tongue. But then, his job title is also a rather puzzling. Balooch is L'Oreal's "global vice president of the research and innovation technology incubator", a role that sees him based primarily in California's Silicon Valley.
"For a scientist, it's an amazing place to work," Balooch says. "Despite the travel." Indeed, Balooch can truly live up to the "global" part of his title. A normal month sees him spend 10 days in Silicon Valley, 10 days at L'Oreal's New York headquarters, and 10 days in Paris, where his family home is. "The secret is to never look at the time from where you just were," he says. "As soon as you board the airplane, start living in the time zone where you are heading."
![L'Oreal's global vice president of the research and innovation technology incubator, Guive Balooch.](/web/20170212200335im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/a/5/g/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gua55x.png/1486702100197.jpg)
Balooch is good to his word on arrival in Australia, one of more than 40 countries he has visited while working for the cosmetics giant. He stepped off a plane in Melbourne and headed straight for the boardroom at L'Oreal's Australian headquarters where he gave a two-hour briefing on his team's technological innovations.
Balooch's world is the nexus between science, consumer electronics and the beauty industry, and his role is to invest in the technologies that will keep L'Oreal ahead of the pack in a world of constant and rapid change.
![L'Oreal is no ordinary company.](/web/20170212200335im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/a/8/b/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gua55x.png/1486702100197.jpg)
In any other company, it would be a nice little niche for a trained scientist, but L'Oreal is no ordinary company. On Friday, it announced its full year results, with 2016 sales topping €25.84 billion ($36 billion), up 2.3 per cent on the previous year. It makes L'Oreal the world's biggest beauty conglomerate, and means the research and technology "incubator" that Balooch heads is one of the best-funded R&D; teams in the world.
Last year L'Oreal spent €849.8 millon on total R&D;, equating to 3.3 per cent of sales.
"We are very lucky," he says. "My team has freedom to create, to innovate, to embrace the very best in industrial design, in science, and technology and adapt it for the beauty industry."
Never before has technological disruption been such a challenge to established. Famous names such as Kodak have fallen by the wayside after technology, coupled with management inaction usurped their once-dominant market positions. Such is the rate of change that titans such as Nokia and Blackberry have come and virtually gone in short periods of time. On Friday, L'Oreal announced the time had come for The Body Shop, one of its best-known global brands, which is being sold as part of a "brand portfolio optimisation".
![My UV Patch by L'Oreal tracks exposure to sun over a five-day period.](/web/20170212200335im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/a/5/h/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gua55x.png/1486702100197.jpg)
Part of Balooch's job is to find the start-ups to replace mature business such as The Body Shop. "Even in our industry, the beauty industry, the consumer is changing," Balooch says. "And technology is changing consumers. You need to invest at the very cutting edge."
In May last year, L'Oreal entered a joint-venture partnership with Founders Factory, a "global digital accelerator and incubator" based in London. The partners invest in beauty tech start-ups across the world, and have agreed to co-create two new companies every year.
Balooch's 24-person team in San Francisco also develops projects internally. The L'Oreal incubator's first product, released last year, was a phone app called Makeup Genius. It allows customers to "virtually" try make up from the L'Oreal range and see on their phone how they will look.
"There are maybe 100 lipstick colours in a range," Balooch says. "Who can try on all those? The app allows a customer to see how that colour suits them."
This is what we do. We see a problem, see a market, and then use science and technology to find the answer.
Guive Balooch.
Within a year, the app has already passed 20 million downloads.
The next product is the one that has brought Balooch to Australia. On television, he saw a documentary on a team of scientists developing a wearable skin patch that could monitor and record a patient's heart rate.
"My first thought was, 'can we make this record UV rays?'," he says. Balooch's team entered a joint venture with the scientists who developed the technology. At last year's Consumer Electronics Show is Las Vegas Balooch unveiled the My UV Patch, a wearable skin sensor designed to monitor UV exposure and change colour. As a nod to the scientists who invented the technology, it comes in the shape of a heart.
Working in conjunction with a phone app, the sensor detects both harmful UV rays and valuable sunlight over a five-day period, ensuring wearers get the right balance of sun exposure.
L'Oreal launched the My UV patch in Australia in October. "Australia is one of the countries we had in mind when developing this," Balooch says. "You have the highest rate of melanoma in the world, and we want to help consumers educate themselves about sun protection."
L'Oreal Australia has made the patches free in Australia for that reason.
The latest innovation is a "smart hairbrush" that includes in-built sensors that can tell you the health of your hair. The "Hair Coach" includes an accelerometer, a microphone and a gyroscope, and can monitor everything from hair humidity to the amount of damage caused by dye.
Balooch says the brush was designed to meet latent demand and solve one of the oldest of beauty complaints – the bad hair day. More than half of all beauty-related Google searches seek help for problem hair.
"This is what we do. We see a problem, see a market, and then use science and technology to find the answer," he says.
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