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Dominic Akerele, Director of Tech Innovation, L’Oréal Groupe

Designing the Future of Beauty Innovation

Devices for bespoke hair color application, smartphone-applied blemish coverup and a tool for dermatologists to make personalized skin serums … it sounds like a salon far in the future. But these are all examples of devices, and digital services that scientist Dominic Akerele (MCS 2015) developed for the L’Oréal Groupe — a global beauty company with 37 brands including Kiehl’s, Maybelline and Redken — while designing tech innovation in its augmented beauty group.

“We started as a small tech incubator within the group, but we’ve grown to become a full-blown division and global team that’s like a beauty-focused 'Shark Tank' innovation lab,” Dom says.

Dom studied chemistry at Carnegie Mellon but doesn’t touch traditional cosmetics. Rather, he’s a scientist, product designer and entrepreneur in a research and innovation-focused unit working on the emerging niche of beauty tech.

One recent innovation is a water conserving salon showerhead, , which was named one of Time magazine’s best 100 inventions of 2021. Water Saver divides the water flow into smaller droplets that work with a specialized hair care formula to rinse effectively with less water. It enables salon users to save water and monitor energy consumption and savings while using the device.

Water conservation is also a passion project for Dom outside of work. He’s been involved with the global youth leadership organization One Young World as a delegate and now ambassador. And he is a co-founder of Waterboys, an entrepreneurial design futures studio. With two partners, he focuses on solving urban challenges that exist at the intersection of water, waste and sustainability with well-designed products.

“We have this belief that not all solutions are meant to be global. It's maybe more important to pay attention to things on a local scale. We consider the culture of the community to create sustainable products in a smaller ecosystem, on the scale of a single city,” he says.

Waterboys projects include a water bottle rental system, a disposable mask recycling service and a campaign to improve pet waste disposal around Brooklyn, New York.

“The commonality between my work at L’Oréal and the Waterboys is the focus on innovation and design,” he says. “Those are the skill sets I built at Carnegie Mellon, which is the link between the two.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed