Sure, I can take a mirror to my skin and see surface-level flaws like acne, redness and wrinkles. But to tend to my skin in the long term, apparently I need to know what’s happening within the cells underneath — that’s where L'Oréal's new scientific skin-analysis system may have a chance to transform the skincare industry as we know it.
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These days, most of my skincare product recommendations come from social media, although I honestly never know if any of the creams and serums are doing anything to help my complexion. The L’Oreal Cell BioPrint, developed in partnership with Korean company NanoEnTek, looks to solve that all-too-common problem by testing for biological markers via micro-fluidics. These markers not only determine your skin’s current state, but predict your proclivity to different skin conditions in the future, too.
Curious (and also mildly terrified) to know how my skin is holding up these days, I let the folks from L’Oreal test my skin at CES 2025. The demonstration started with a pair of tape strips lifting dead skill cells from my cheeks. The strips are inserted into a cartridge containing a solution that separates the selected proteins L’Oreal’s team of biologists identified as valuable biological markers. The fluid then gets fed to a lab-on-a-chip, which then gets slotted into the Cell BioPrint machine (the machine kind of looks like a gaming console, for size reference.)
After a minute or two, the lab-on-a-chip spits back out like an ATM card, signaling that my results are ready. A companion interface populated a thorough analysis of my skin, starting with how my biological age compares to my chronological age — I’m extremely relieved to report (or should I say, eager to brag) that my skin is two years younger than I actually am. But taking a closer look at the predictive section, while most elements of my skin are pretty healthy, I have some things to be concerned about in the future as indicated by the sampled proteins. For example, the Cell BioPrint thinks that I’ll be prone to significant wrinkling in the upcoming years. Yikes.
No analysis is any good without recommended action, so I was excited to peruse some product and ingredient recommendations that should benefit my skin based on my results. The interface even flagged retinol as the standout ingredient my skin is likely to see high responsiveness to. As a result, I left the demo with a new slate of products for my soon-to-be-started skincare routine.
What I like about the Cell BioPrint is that it's meant for more clinical or commercial settings vs. at-home use. It’s important to be mindful about what you’re putting on your skin, so having an expert on standby helping to operate the machine or explain what the results mean seems smart to me. There are all sorts of gadgets and scanners out there that claim to help with skincare, but L’Oreal seems to have the authority and approach to make the Cell BioPrint a legitimate innovation in the beauty tech market.
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