Oriental skin tones spell good news for global cosmetics majors

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: The quest for the holy grail of beauty begins in a stark white bathroom, where a middle-aged strawberry blonde primps her freshly washed and blown hair under the relentless gaze of two overhead cameras. Steps away, a researcher checks a flickering computer screen, toggling controls to zoom in on the woman, who has just sampled unmarked bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

This bathroom laboratory near the Place de la Concorde in Paris is a shiny ceramic war room for one of the leading international beauty giants, L’Oreal, and one the company is reproducing around the world. In France alone, researchers are examining the mixed population of the Paris region to create what is called an “atlas for the human hair,” with test subjects reflecting European and Western and Central African roots to compare with volunteers in Beijing and Shanghai.

Like its major rivals, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, L’Oreal, based in Paris, is battling for advantage in a fiercely competitive $231-bn market for cosmetics and grooming products. In the business of beauty, growth is powered by alluring hawkers like the actress Scarlett Johansson and glamour novelties like “phototonic” eye shadow intended to refract light like butterfly wings, or new cosmetic lines suited for aging skin and the color palette of baby boomers. L’Oreal, with sales last year of 14 bn euros ($16.9 bn), is spending heavily on research, devoting 507 mn euros, or more than 3 % of revenue, to it.

Crucial to that effort is the search for differences that could help build a brand in critical emerging markets like India and China. L’Oreal has an expanding network of 13 evaluation centers around the world created to observe grooming and ponder a variety of burning questions: Do national differences exist in primping styles? Would women in Japan and Europe, for instance, stroke on mascara with the same lavish hand? (The answer is that in Japan, women apply mascara with an average of 100 brush strokes compared with Europeans, who are satisfied with 50, a difference noted by ethnologists for L’Oreal.)