L’Oréal Paris is betting big on Beauty Genius.

The brand, whose parent company L’Oréal has gained status as a leader in beauty-tech in recent years, is looking to widen the reach of its generative AI-powered Beauty Genius tool with a newly cemented WhatsApp partnership.

Kicking off in early 2026, the partnership will make the tool, which offers personalized regimen recommendations as well as research-backed responses to ingredient-related inquiries and more, accessible directly via WhatsApp, which Statista reports has roughly 3 billion monthly active users.

“You will be able to message with Beauty Genius the way you would with a friend,” said Thomas Vince, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal Paris. “You’ll be able to be very conversational in asking questions, getting diagnostics and recommendations and, ultimately, driving to fulfillment, if that’s where your experience goes.”

This combination of diagnostic capability with a conversational nature and flow is a key differentiator for Beauty Genius, which was unveiled by L’Oréal chief executive officer Nicolas Hieronimus at the 2024 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The tool launched in beta mode in October via the L’Oréal Paris website, and has since hosted more than 480,000 conversations.

According to the company, cosmetics-related inquiries account for a little more than half of the conversations, followed by skin care at more than a third, with hair care and hair coloring conversations comprising the remainder.

“The queries range from very sophisticated to very basic — from someone who is new to the category or to beauty in general, you might see questions like, ‘How do I apply eye shadow?’ ‘How do I apply hair dye?’ — and then you move into more sophisticated, longer and very pointed queries, which show a much more conversational exchange between the brand and the individual,” Vince said.

Said Laura Branik, president of L’Oréal Paris USA: “We see a need for more conversational commerce, and that is what we are hoping to answer with Beauty Genius.”

With more than 750 products across makeup, skin and hair care and coloring, L’Oréal Paris ranks as the biggest beauty brand in the world. It is also a routine top performer when it comes to influencer marketing, with platforms like CreatorIQ and Traackr consistently ranking L’Oréal Paris as a top 10 brand by monthly social media momentum.

“That’s one of the reasons we started [Beauty Genius] with L’Oréal Paris — if we can crack it for L’Oréal Paris, we can make it work with any brand,” Branik said.

Because L’Oréal Paris is most prominently sold in the mass channel, which doesn’t offer the in-store expertise offered by beauty advisers at specialty beauty stores, Beauty Genius also serves to fill that gap — with the added benefits of being available remotely and around the clock.

Though he did not share numbers, Vince said the brand “has seen a positive impact on sales, including significantly higher conversions and average order value, among consumers who have engaged with Beauty Genius versus those who haven’t.”

While Beauty Genius’ product recommendations are limited to those within the L’Oréal Paris portfolio, the education it can provide ranges from breaking down ingredient functions to clarifying skin care myths and trends.

“We see that consumers don’t want to need a Ph.D. to understand what kind of skin care to use; there is a lot of chatter, and Beauty Genius offers a way to demystify while ensuring the answers consumers get are correct and backed by science,” Branik said.

This is significant especially now, given the evolving nature of how consumers search.

A 2024 survey by Adobe found that more than two in five Americans use TikTok as a search engine, while data from Statcounter shows that Google’s search market share dropped below 90 percent for the first time since 2015 for the last three months of 2024, with ChatGPT being a key share gainer. Even Google is doubling down on AI overviews, which, according to BrightEdge, now appear in more than 11 percent of Google Search queries, a 22 percent year-over-year increase.

But Google AI Overviews and Open AI-owned ChatGPT are known to at times to deliver misinformation, a current inevitability due to the varying credibility levels of the data that feeds their respective large language models, or LLMs. With a more precise approach to the data it trains its model on — which includes proprietary information from L’Oréal’s own research and innovation centers — Beauty Genius aims to establish itself as an authority in the space.

The bet is a next leg of L’Oréal’s increasing ambitions in the beauty-tech space, fueled by efforts to bring forth tech innovations that are accessible and solve solutions for everyday consumers.

“We don’t create technology for technology’s sake,” Vince said. “It always goes back to consumer-centricity. A consumer can use ChatGPT, they can use Google to address some of these questions — but we’ve distilled our unique point of difference, and we understand that it needs to be personal, it needs to come from a beauty authority and it needs to be 24/7.”