A world leader in cosmetics, L'Oréal has been working for beauties throughout the world for more than 100 years, with a portfolio of 23 international brands. Present in 130 countries, in 2010 L'Oréal made consolidated sales of 19.5 billion euros and employs 66600 people.

Since its creation in 1909 by a chemical engineer, Research has been at the heart of L'Oréal's strategy and culture.
More than 3400 people, specialists in over thirty disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, optics, dermatology, toxicology, genetics, etc.), attempt to push back the limits of knowledge about hair and skin. They are deepening our intimate understanding at a cellular level, highlighting the biological mechanisms at work in aging, natural color, graying or hair loss, synthesizing molecules that act, protect, repair or color (more than 100 molecules in 35 years), designing, developing and testing products suited to all types of skin and hair in its 18 international research centers (France, China, Japan, USA, Brazil, India).

In 2010, L'Oréal devoted almost 665 million euros to cosmetic and dermatological research and its teams filed 612 patents. One quarter of this budget is allocated to advanced research programs mainly linked to progress in the life sciences. In parallel, to support its strategy to develop methods for predicting the innocuousness and effectiveness of its products, L'Oréal is also working on sophisticated mathematical models requiring considerable calculation power.

Digital simulation using high-performance computing (HPC) is fast becoming an essential tool in scientific research, as it enables experiments that cannot be conducted in a lab to be replaced, and productivity to be improved due to significant time savings.
For L'Oréal's Research & Innovation, at the crossroads of several disciplines, it is a key factor in the success of its missions:

• Discovering new avenues of innovation
• Predicting in the field of safety evaluation
• Simulating to anticipate visible efficacy

Faced with the need to calculate before designing, modeling enables L'Oréal Research to process all the interactions between active ingredients, formulas and cosmetic substrates within the same time frame.