Global personal care company L’Oréal has released a prototype for the first wearable sensor and app to measure the skin’s pH levels for creating customised and personalised skincare regimes.
My Skin Track pH was developed with L’Oréal’s skincare brand La Roche-Posay and Epicore Biosystems, a microfluidic sensing platform.
The company explains that by wearing the sensor on the inner arm, it captures trace amounts of sweat from skin’s pores, providing an accurate reading within 15 minutes. The scale ranges from acidic to basic (0 to 14). Skin is considered healthy between 4.5 and 5.5.
The user is advised to open the app and then photograph the sensor, which then reads the app as well as the wearer’s local sweat loss. It can then analyse the skin health and make a customised La Roche-Posay product recommendation.
Guive Balooch, global vice president of the L’Oréal technology incubator, an area of L’Oréal’s research and innovation division said, “The scientific and medical communities have long known the link between skin pH levels and common skin concerns that millions of people experience every day. Our goal is to use this advanced technology to empower people with meaningful information about their skin, so that they can find the products that are right for their individual needs. At L’Oréal, we know that health is the future of beauty and we are committed to leveraging technology to bring powerful insights and solutions to our consumers.”
Electrical engineer Dr Roozbeh Ghaffari, and co-founder and CEO of Epicore Biosystems, added, “Epicore is thrilled to collaborate with L’Oréal, to create a new use case for this technology that drives new research and understanding around skin pH.”
L’Oréal has stated that this technology will be available to a number of US-based dermatologists in 2019 with the goal of launching a customer-facing product.
