How L'Oréal Groupe Embeds Sustainability in R&D

The lotions and potions of the global beauty market are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. From skincare and makeup to haircare and fragrance, these items are in bathrooms and washbags around the world. 

Beauty products, like all material goods, can have environmental consequences. Ingredients like palm oil, siloxanes and microplastics can have a sustainability impact alongside all the steps it takes to get a product from formulation to the bathroom cabinet.

L’Oréal set its first industrial environment targets 20 years ago. For Ana Kljuic, Vice President Research & Innovation (R&I) for the Future & Green Sciences at L’Oréal, sustainable beauty is a mission measured in both hard data and long-term transformation.

“I’m in charge of sustainable development and research and innovation,” Ana explains. “My team leads L’Oréal for the Future, our transformation programme and our Green Sciences programme, which is how research responds to our 2030 sustainability objectives.”

L’Oréal’s R&I network spans 4,000 researchers. Ana’s role is to mobilise all of them towards sustainability targets while planning beyond 2030. This means assessing the environmental impact of every ingredient, exploring cutting-edge technologies like AI and identifying new ways science can reshape the beauty industry.

Read the full story in Issue 56 of Sustainability Magazine.

What is green science?

Green science, Ana says, is not a single discipline but a framework. 

“It’s a set of scientific disciplines that deal with how we source and transform our ingredients,” she explains.

This framework has four pillars. First is sustainable agriculture, ensuring raw plant materials are grown responsibly. Second is green chemistry and green extraction, which replace high-energy or resource-intensive processes with lower-impact methods. Third is biotechnology, covering techniques like fermentation that use living systems to produce or transform ingredients. Finally, there is innovation in ingredient transformation, creating new materials without depleting natural resources.

In practical terms, green science covers the earliest stages of L’Oréal’s value chain: the upstream processes that happen long before a product reaches a shop shelf.

L’Oréal’s sustainability goals

Before change can happen, impact must be measured. In 2016, L’Oréal developed the Sustainable Product Optimisation Tool (SPOT) with 11 independent experts, including the LCA Institute in Montreal. Based on lifecycle analysis, SPOT calculates the environmental impact of products from raw material sourcing to end-of-life.

With clear baselines in place, L’Oréal has committed to ensuring at least 75% of its ingredients come from renewable natural sources or recycled materials by 2030. Today, Ana says that 66% of the company’s ingredients already meet this criterion and 82% are biodegradable.

Ana reveals the biggest challenge is scaling sustainable technologies at a viable cost. 

“It’s a race against the clock with climate change,” she warns. “We see incredible innovations in agriculture, sourcing and packaging. But bringing them to scale affordably, in a short time, is the real challenge.”

Partnerships and collaborations

“You need partnerships for methodology, for innovation, for scale-up — even with your competition,” Ana says.

French-American startup Interstellar Lab creates AI-controlled, climate-resistant biopods for plant production. Another is a partnership with Cosmo International, a French family business that extracts perfume ingredients using only air to preserve delicate volatile molecules.

Sometimes competitors join forces. More than 60 cosmetics players, including L’Oréal, have co-developed EcoBeautyScore, a standardised environmental footprint label for products, designed to help consumers compare sustainability impacts across brands. 

“This will give all cosmetic players a common language for communicating with consumers,” Ana says. “It will help them navigate the confusing world of sustainability.”

Rohini Behl, Head of Sustainability for SAPMENA at L'Oréal, adds: “It takes a village to make real, lasting change. We need everyone in the ecosystem – governments, businesses, suppliers, retailers, consumers and communities – working together.”

Ezgi Barcenas, L’Oréal’s Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer, writes on LinkedIn: “There is still much to do to accelerate our transformation, build greater resilience and to create shared value – more partnerships to form and newer solutions to pilot, scale and help finance.”

Sustainable beauty in the future

Bringing new developments to consumers at scale is not simple. This process, Ana says, takes time. 

“You can’t grow plants overnight,” she explains. “It takes years to bring some innovations to market.”

However, she remains optimistic. 

“We’re living at an incredibly exciting moment,” Ana says. “The interaction between nature, science, and technology is giving us a multitude of new options. The more we embrace it together, the faster we can move for our consumers, our planet and our business.”

Rohini concludes: “Transformation happens through actions – one product, one choice, one moment at a time. Making deliberate decisions every day can set in motion forces greater than themselves.”

Read the full story in Issue 56 of Sustainability Magazine.