‍The personal care industry is doing a makeover, thanks to technology and product innovations, the sector is on a roll since virtual try-on and online marketplaces have entered the picture. People aim at looking their best and the industry is developing all sorts of technology to make that happen.
The sector is in full bloom, it is estimated to reach $850 billion by 2024, this growth and demand to look flawless are motivated in part by social media, as people focus on hygiene, natural products, and natural ingredients.
Skincare makes up a large portion of the business as it represents 45% of the overall cosmetic product’s sales, itself about 40% of the personal care industry. As the importance, of skincare, grows, people look for overall healthier products that won’t harm their skins. Natural products that nourish the skin are getting most of the attention.
Personal care is also gaining traction from social media, brands have understood this shift from traditional forms of marketing to digital. They now try and leverage influencers and social media to put their products in front of massive audiences.
Another shift in the business is the use of gender-neutral faces to promote beauty products, the idea of grooming oneself is starting to appeal to both genders as we see tags like “For Women” and “For Men” disappear.
Lastly, vegan products and environmentally sustainable brands are growing as customers try to stay clear of goods that are sourced from unethical means.
Technology has taken quite a central spot in the personal care industry, let’s look at the reasons why technology holds that position.
Most of the ads we see for personal care are online, social media offers brands the ability to reach a large audience of young people that care about their looks. The industry pays a lot of attention to influencers and online ads that represent their main source of promotion.
Technology as a whole permits faster communication and easier promotions. The digital world also offers cost effective ways to promote brands and get detailed feedback on how a promotion is doing.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and numerous data, analytics has improved in all industies and particularly on the personal care industry. The digital era provides a lot of data that can be analyzed to get feedback on certain products and how well they’re doing.
As big data and AI are rising, technology helps businesses to extract trends and better understand the reasons behind a product’s success.
As in any industry relating to consumers, it’s important for businesses to innovate and offer new products to their clients. This keeps them engaged and ensures customers stick to a brand, boosting sales in the process
Technology provides a way of developing new chemical compounds and finding new processes to make better products that align with the client’s requests.
This part of the article will dive into the different technologies that the industry uses.
As data becomes more numerous, businesses have to learn to use that data effectively, AI offers a powerful way of understanding trends and making decisions on that result.
The field of AI can be quite complicated but the way it operates is often through neural networks. These networks allow computers to exhibit complex patterns.
For example, an AI and big data enthusiast created an AI that can accurately predict the success of a movie by looking at the comments about the movie trailer on twitter.
Our comments actually reveal a lot about what we think and whether or not we'd go see the movie in theaters. These complex patterns can't really be found by humans as they would require a very complex and long analysis phase. AI solves that problem by accelerating the process and enabling companies to go through  large amounts of data.
A large part of the personal care industry revolves around measurements and sensors of all kinds. For the majority of cases, these sensors don’t have to the best possible ones available on the market as their general utilization doesn’t require it.
The appearance of wearables however suggests that customers desire even more information about their bodies. This comes in two forms, the first one being new  measurements, we’ve now seen the arrival of heart rat measurements and blood oxygen levels. The second one being more precise measurements and ways of determining a variable. In their early days, heart rate monitors seemed gimmicky, technology has made these extremely reliable to the point where some watches can analyze your heart rate just like an ECG would.
Nowadays, small heart rate monitors found on wearables use a combination of lasers and light sensors to measure your heart rate. By shining light at your blood vessels, the light sensor can detect small changes in intensity that are directly correlated to your heart rate.
The personal care industry has made great use of technology to minimize already existing technology and implementing it into wearable devices. As the space now has new ways of acquiring data from their customers, the sector deals with important data analysis technologies. The space is expected to keep growing as more features are implemented and as people implement personal care wearables into their lives.
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