Vivold Consulting
Product & Tech Updates

L'Oreal brings Maybelline virtual try-on to ChatGPT

L'Oreal's OpenAI deal puts Maybelline try-on, product discovery, and ChatGPT ads in play

Key Insights

L'Oreal has announced a wide-ranging collaboration with OpenAI, unveiled at VivaTech 2026, that brings Maybelline's virtual makeup try-on directly into ChatGPT via L'Oreal's ModiFace AR technology. The deal spans consumer shopping tools, product discovery for brands like Lancome and Kerastase, advertising pilots (SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, Garnier), and R&D - including using OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model for skin-microbiome research. It lands as OpenAI reports ChatGPT at more than 900 million weekly users.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

A beauty giant goes all-in on ChatGPT

L'Oreal has unveiled a broad collaboration with OpenAI at VivaTech 2026, threading generative AI through its consumer tools, advertising, and research. The headline for shoppers: Maybelline New York's virtual makeup try-on is coming directly inside ChatGPT, powered by L'Oreal's ModiFace augmented-reality technology so users can test looks through a conversational interface. L'Oreal bought ModiFace in 2018, and says its Beauty Tech tools logged more than 120 million uses across 66 countries and 31 brands by the end of 2025.

Discovery and advertising inside the assistant

The deal is about distribution as much as novelty. L'Oreal will work with OpenAI to improve how its products surface in ChatGPT in the US, starting with brands including Lancome and Kerastase, and several of its labels - SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, and Garnier - are part of OpenAI's global ChatGPT advertising pilot, which places ads within AI-assisted consumer interactions. L'Oreal framed it as AI-native advertising at the moment of intent, though it hasn't detailed how those placements will look. The commercial logic is plain: the company says e-commerce grew double digits in 2025 and passed 30% of sales, while OpenAI says ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers - a storefront too big to ignore.

Beyond the storefront: research and internal tooling

The partnership reaches into the lab, too. L'Oreal says it is using GPT-Rosalind, OpenAI's life-sciences reasoning model, to help map the skin microbiome - the community of microbes living on skin - beginning with La Roche-Posay, to identify beneficial bacteria for new skincare. That sits alongside other AI bets: a Formulation Foundation Model being built with IBM, and earlier NVIDIA work on 3D product rendering and predictive formulation. Internally, OpenAI's latest model will power CreAItech, L'Oreal's in-house platform for generating brand images and video, part of a program under which the company says 73,000 employees have already been trained in generative AI. The stated aim is to put AI to work for both consumers and staff across marketing and research - and for OpenAI, it is another marquee enterprise foothold as it pushes deeper into commerce.

More in Product & Tech Updates

All Product & Tech Updates stories

Claude gets a 'Reflect' dashboard: Spotify Wrapped for your AI habit - and a masterclass in retention design

Anthropic launched Reflect, a beta dashboard (Free, Pro, and Max users with Memory on) that visualises Claude usage over 1-12 months - top topics, task types, peak hours - and coaches you via its 4D AI Fluency Framework (delegation, description, discernment, diligence), suggesting features like Projects or custom skills based on your patterns. It ships wellbeing controls (quiet hours, break nudges, reflection prompts) built with MIT Media Lab and Boston Children's Hospital experts, and excludes health-linked conversations entirely. TechCrunch's sharp read: beneath the mindfulness framing, Reflect showcases how much of your work runs through Claude - a retention play as much as a wellness one.

Gemini Spark lands on the Mac: Google's 24/7 agent starts working your local files

Gemini Spark, Google's 24/7 agentic assistant, is now available on Mac (beta, US-only, Google AI Ultra subscribers), where it can work directly with files on the computer - sorting and organising them, or turning a folder of invoices into a budgeting worksheet in Google Workspace. The update adds long-requested Google Tasks and Keep integrations plus third-party hooks into Canva, Dropbox, Instacart, OpenTable, and Zillow Rentals, real-time tracking of topics like stocks and breaking news, and - notably for builders - custom MCP support for wiring in your own apps. It puts Spark in direct competition with Claude Desktop, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenClaw for the desktop, where the real productivity (and governance) questions live.

Sakana AI launches Fugu, an orchestration model that matches the frontier

Sakana AI has launched Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system delivered as a single foundation model - Fugu is itself an LLM trained to route tasks across a swappable pool of the world's best models (and recursively to itself) via one OpenAI-compatible API. Sakana says Fugu Ultra matches frontier models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview on demanding engineering, science, and reasoning benchmarks, while pitching the approach as an AI-sovereignty hedge: if one provider's access disappears, as with Anthropic's recently export-controlled models, Fugu reroutes around it. It is generally available today through subscription and pay-as-you-go tiers.