L’Oréal’s Cell BioPrint claims it can tell you which ingredients are best for you.

L’Oréal hopes its latest beauty gadget will help you understand skincare. At CES 2025, the company announced Cell BioPrint, a device designed to analyze your skin and provide personalized advice on how to slow the signs of aging.

The device is the result of a partnership with NanoEntek, a South Korean startup specializing in chips that can read biological fluids. Basically, a person takes a strip of facial tape, applies it to their cheek, and then places the strip in a buffered solution. The solution is then inserted into a cartridge where Cell BioPrint can analyze it. Once your sample is processed, the device takes images of your face while you answer a few short questions about skin issues and aging.

In it, L’Oréal says it uses proteomics, a method of analyzing the structure and function of proteins in biological samples. In this case, Cell BioPrint is designed to determine how well your skin is aging. It then provides personalized advice on how to improve the appearance of your skin, as well as predicting how your skin will respond to specific skincare ingredients.

It’s a compelling claim, but like most beauty techniques, it’s difficult to properly evaluate L’Oréal’s methods without peer-reviewed research or expert involvement. L’Oréal also claims that the device can help predict future cosmetic problems. before They appear. For example, you can determine if your skin is prone to hyperpigmentation or enlarged pores.

Skincare gained enormous popularity during the COVID-19 lockdown, shifting beauty trends towards self-care and sparking the rise of ‘skinfluencers’. On the other hand, word of mouth has since turned skincare purchasing into an extreme sport. Log on to TikTok and you’ll see dozens of skinfluencers urging you to shell out $80 for a bottle of vitamin C serum, debating the moisturizing properties of glycerin and hyaluronic acid, and pointing fingers at this or that retinol cream. (Some may even convince you to buy a wand to stab your face with to increase the potency of that ingredient.) It’s confusing, expensive, and crazy, and what works for one person may not work for another. The best the average consumer can do is cross their fingers and hope that the latest drug they bought actually works.

The beauty of Cell BioPrint is that it claims to use science to cut through this noise. Probably every skinfluencer will tell you that you should start using retinol once you turn 30. this The device will tell you based on your biology whether retinol actually works for you. Personalization has always been a key theme in CES beauty technology, but it’s especially appealing in skincare, which relies heavily on an individual’s biology. But again, there is currently no way to know how reliable Cell BioPrint’s science and recommendations are.

L’Oréal says Cell BioPrint will be easy to use, taking just five minutes. They also say that people can repeat tests to monitor changes and progress over time. That means it may be some time before products like Cell BioPrint are available to consumers. L’Oréal said the device will first be tested in Asia later this year, but other than that, no specific launch date or price has been set.