Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

L’Oréal and IBM: AI-Powered Beauty from Smart Talks with IBM

August 28, 2025·27 min·2 clips

Lipstick is not just a waxy stick but a high-performance marvel born from years of precision science.

Start with lipstick. The host treats it less like makeup than a small machine for thinking about science, taste, and prediction. Lucy goes to Clark, New Jersey, not Paris, and the letdown gives the reporting a nice comic scrape. Then an app changes her face. Someone shows her a virtual try-on tool that lets people test shades without putting anything on in a store. She is startled, then won over. The scene works because the technology is not talked about in the abstract; it is watched on a face as it happens. The phrase is augmented beauty. From there, the episode turns to L'Oréal's claim that it makes both beauty products and beauty experiences. The company history matters. Eugène Schuller, described as a chemist in 1909, becomes the starting point for a brand story built around science. Sun filters in the 1930s and reconstructed skin in the 1970s show that this kind of experimentation was there before the current AI language arrived. IBM comes in through that history. The episode presents artificial intelligence and generative AI as newer tools in a long relationship between cosmetics and research. The tone is curious, not dazzled. Lucy's confused lipstick test keeps the larger claims attached to someone trying to understand what is happening in front of her. The paid frame is clear. The credits say Smart Talks with IBM is a paid advertisement and that the conversations do not necessarily represent IBM's views. That changes how to hear it. The useful part is the odd question underneath the polish: when beauty moves onto screens, who gets to picture themselves differently?

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