L’Oréal beefs up its digital offering with the acquisition of Canadian beauty tech company ModiFace for an undisclosed amount.

WHO: Parham Aarabi founded ModiFace 11 years ago in Toronto, Canada, creating advanced technologies of 3D virtual makeup, color, and skin diagnosis services that use proprietary know-how to track facial features and color. The technology is used by almost all major beauty brands, according to L’Oréal.

WHY: This acquisition is in line with L’Oréal’s digital acceleration strategy to provide the group’s 34 international brands with the most innovative technologies in terms of services and beauty experience.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: “L’Oréal’s aquisition of ModiFace provides an incredible opportunity to innovate on beauty augmented reality and artificial intelligence at an unprecedented scale, the results of which will shape the beauty industry for the decades to come,” Parham Aarabi told WWD.

Lubomira Rochet, chief digital officer of L’Oréal, said that ModiFace will “become the heart of our digital services R&D. With its world-class team, technologies and sustained track record in terms of beauty-tech innovations, ModiFace will support the reinvention of the beauty experience around innovative services to help our customers discover, try and choose products and brands. We at L’Oréal and ModiFace want to pioneer this new page of the beauty industry and serve our customers with innovative services and experiences.”

DETAILS:

• L’Oréal acquired 100% of ModiFace.
• Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• ModiFace will become part of L’Oréal’s Digital Services Factory, a network to create and develop new digital services for the company’s brands.
• ModiFace will remain based in Toronto and will collaborate closely with L’Oréal’s Advanced Research.
• ModiFace counts almost 70 engineers, researchers, and scientists on staff, who have registered more than 30 patents and published over 200 scientific papers.