Beauty Tech Recruits Voice In Coty x Google Home Collab

Coty's launches Clairol Colour Expert to help bring shoppers hands-free hair colour expertise at the shelf and in the home


The merger of beauty and technology is taking off. We have written quite a bit about how technological advancements have been revolutionising and disrupting the beauty industry. Leading the way is one of the world’s largest beauty companies COTY, has launched the first at-home hair colour Action for the Google Assistant on Google Home smart speakers and smartphones. The ‘Clairol Color Expert’ provides consumers with a hands-free, voice-activated guide to the entire at-home hair colour process – from finding the right shade at the shelf to applying colour, re-application and aftercare at home. This step-by-step service is perfect for first-time and repeat colourists and is easily accessible – say “Hey Google, talk to Clairol.

The Clairol Color Expert builds on Coty’s digital innovation strategy, which focuses on insight driven, consumer-first and category level solutions to consumer problems through emerging technology and new platforms.
Fred Gerantabee, Coty’s Vice President, Digital Innovation, said, “In beauty, service is the new product, and for consumers, the real value of a product is not just what’s in the box, but the expertise and service that comes with it. We worked with Google, who helped us identify insights around known category challenges combined with how (and where) beauty consumers are using voice assistants. By delivering Clairol expertise through the unique Google Assistant ecosystem, we can transform the at-home hair colour experience and truly help Clairol consumers feel confident that they will get better results with a lifeline and expert at every step of their journey.”

ALSO READ: Beauty Tech On The Rise As Coty Launches New Skill For Amazon Echo Show

The Google Assistant is a crucial player in the rapidly growing voice market, available on more than 500 million devices, across Android phones, iPhones, smart TVs, Chromebooks, and on intelligent speakers such as Google Home and a new category of devices called Smart Displays. It serves as an ideal platform for a beauty assistant given its depth of reach, especially amongst 18 to 34-year-old women who buy at home colour. The ability for millions of women to be able to access a personalised hair colour assistant across different touchpoints and devices – whether at the shelf via their smartphone or in the home on their smart display or
speaker – is a significant advancement for the at-home hair colour category where consumers often feel overwhelmed by the challenges associated with colouring their hair.

This is not the first time that COTY has dabbled with technology. We previously wrote about their collaboration with creative innovation studio Holition. They partnered up to unveil a blended reality beauty Magic Mirror at the Bourjois boutique in Paris. COTY developed the revolutionary magic mirror, which was a composite of PERCH Interactive’s technology and Holition’s augmented reality SDK, FACE by Holition. The technology integrated physical products with digital content. On their latest project,
Clairol’s Color Assistant was built by Beamly, Coty’s in-house MarTech agency, and Voxly Digital, a leading Voice developer.

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Founding editor-in-chief of FashNerd.com, Muchaneta is currently one of the leading influencers writing about the merger of fashion with technology and wearable technology. She has also given talks at Premiere Vision, Munich Fabric Start and Pure London, to name a few. Besides working as a fashion innovation consultant for various fashion companies like LVMH Atelier, Muchaneta has also contributed to Vogue Business, is a senior contributor at The Interline and an associate lecturer at London College of Fashion, UAL.