Sticking the My UV Skin patch on your arm is a cinch. It’s as simple as applying a Band-Aid or a nicotine patch. There’s one most important difference: This personalized sun protection device has actually 5 layers of micron-thin electronics, including near field communication capabilities.
But the creators of this particular wearable would certainly merely as soon you didn’t think of any of that. For it to be successful, in fact, you’ll have to conveniently ignore that it’s a piece of sophisticated technology—so much so that you’ll throw it away after 5 days. L’Oréal prefers you to believe of it as skin care.
“If L’Oréal put a product in front of you and said, ‘Here, put this on your skin,’ there’s a good opportunity you’re going to test it,” says Liam Casey, CEO of PCH International, the engineering and design firm that helped make the product. “If, like, HP put it out there and said, ‘Hey, put that on your skin,’ . . . I’m sorry.”
When L’Oréal’s La Roche Posay skin-care brand rolled out its digital UV tattoo at the Consumer Electronics Reveal in January, it received widespread attention. A sticker that measures UV exposure and connects along with your smartphone to notify you to put on sunscreen is a winning pitch. And it represents a far larger opportunity—the merging of the $115 billion global skin-care market along with the $223 billion consumer electronics industry.
“Today you have actually a lot of NFCs in points like the hotel reader cards where it lets you open your hotel,” says Guive Balooch, global vice president of L’Oréal Technology Incubator, where My UV Skin was born. “Yet . . . this is going to be the future. I’m sure of it. The brand-new wearables in the next few years will certainly be all around being able to put points on your body.”
That said, making a line of technology products doesn’t come naturally to a company that has actually historically specialized in chemistry. And while L’Oréal pushes millions of tubes of lipstick every year, scaling up a supply chain in the electronics industry calls for a different kind of know-how.
Billed as a “second skin electronic wearable,” the patch monitors how much UV exposure you’re getting on any given day and gives you personalized care help based on your skin color, tone, and type. It all connects to an app that analyzes data from the patch’s sensors and determines how much UV exposure you’ve received. (Hint: skin damage happens means sooner compared to you think!).
All that happens inside a patch that is regarding 50 microns thick (around half the width of a human hair). There are 5 layers, starting along with the adhesive strip that sticks to your skin. The next layer includes an NFC coil, as well as the microchip that sends a signal to your phone to open the app. The next couple of layers contain the dyes that modification color and pattern showing, even free of a phone, that the patch is working. And finally a substrate that seals the whole package in to a heart shape and prevents rusting of the metals inside.
Overview Layers
“All these different contents come from different suppliers . . . and you have actually to have actually the accuracy of cutting this free of deforming any of the substrate between each cut,” says Andre Yousefi, lead engineer on this project and a key section of the group that has actually incubated products such as Ringly and the Birdi Smart Air Monitor. Once the sections are in place, the skin patch—which is regarding an inch in diameter—can easily be assembled.
That’s As soon as the manufacturing process get hold of tricky, because the patch cannot be exposed to any light. “You manage that within a quite controlled UV environment,” says Yousefi. “And you’re running it through fast enough that it doesn’t get hold of much exposure.”
The layer above the electronics includes photo-oxidated dye that reacts to light. There are 16 squares in the middle, and 10 of the squares are reference colors, “so they’ll calibrate the measurement,” says L’Oréal’s Balooch. “And then you have actually 6 of these squares that modification color . . . at different rates. This square is 20 minutes in the sun. This square is two hours in the sun. This square is eight hours, this is one day, this is two days, this is 5 days.”
The squares are in a quite individual order and color pattern—the pattern is essentially a mathematical algorithm represented as pixels. As they start to turn color, you take the app, take an image of the patch, and little by little it tells you how much sun you’ve been getting cumulatively during the time you’ve been wearing it. It likewise tells you As soon as the most sun-damaging times have actually been.
“That algorithm, it’s quite complex,” Yousefi says. It’s “L’Oréal’s PhD secret sauce around the UV.”
No Exposure Full Exposure
L’Oréal partnered along with MC10, the Massachusetts-based flexible sensor maker, to prototype and miniaturize the product. After refining the design for much more compared to a year, the cosmetics company turned to PCH for further engineering improvements as well as developing a supply chain and manufacturing process that could scale it in to a consumer product.
“The problem along with something like this is bringing with each other so several different technologies,” says Liam Casey, founder and CEO of PCH International. “You have actually to get hold of the expertise from L’Oréal around the layer that goes on the skin. You have actually to go to MC10 to get hold of some experience on the technology part. That reason they’re much more inclined to come to us, because they’re seeing all these terrific ideas, they’re saying, ‘Okay, these are real ideas, how do we actually commercialize them?'”
As a result, L’Oréal and PCH entered in to a strategic partnership that will certainly lead to much more products in the years ahead. The heart will certainly be only one of the patch shapes, and there are much more products in the pipeline.
“We want to build a collection of products in coming years that are the link between technology and beauty,” adds Balooch. “That’s not only around merely wearables. It’s around personalizing, customizing cosmetics.”
When the My UV Patch launches later this year as section of the La Roche Posay brand, the strategy is to provide it away for free. The sampling strategy is meant to get hold of people used to wearing the technology. And much more importantly from L’Oréal’s perspective, to raise awareness of sun and skin care.
“There is an inherent disconnect between people and understanding really how much sun exposure they have,” says Balooch. “They merely don’t know how much exposure they’re getting on a day-to-day basis, which by itself is going to be like an epiphany.”
The app will certainly likewise offer help regarding just what types of skin-care serums and sunscreens to use, of course—as well as just what lifestyle changes to make. The UV filter market alone is expected to grow to $624 million by 2018. L’Oréal has actually been researching “photo protection” products for 35 years now, and Balooch thinks we’re moving beyond the era in which sunscreen is considered a stand-alone product. “Which types of regimens of products ought to you use with each other based on the level of exposure you’ve had?” he says. “For example, you could have actually a serum and an SPF. There’s knowledge regarding the level of UVA that you’re getting and wrinkles and dark spots.”
How it all works: For each of the 5 days that the patch works, it will certainly tell you to take the scan every few hours and you’ll get hold of a graph of how much exposure you’ve had. It will certainly likewise provide you help around products to use as well as lifestyle tips. As Balooch explains, “just what are the points that we would certainly recommend for you to do to protect yourself better, like during these hours of peak sun, ensure you apply the right quantity of sunscreen, ensure you go to the shade. Those can easily only happen if you truly understand how much sun is really on the person’s skin. along with a weather app, you wouldn’t have the ability to do that, because they have actually one sensor in the middle of the city that’s assuming you’re out in the same area the whole time.”
And in case you were wondering: You can easily apply sunscreen on top of the patch. It won’t modification color until the product has actually been photo-oxidized. “That is quite important,” Balooch says.
Basic Exploded View
The final packaging is still being perfected, Yet if Balooch’s group can easily get hold of mainstream women and children used to wearing a near field communication device on their skin, it will certainly represent a huge step in the mainstreaming of physique sensors.
“Our placement in L’Oréal is to bring tech in a means to empower the selections for the consumer,” says Balooch. “In the next 5 years, I believe people are going to be much more demanding regarding having products that really job for their specific needs. The much more we have actually technologies [to] understand just what their specific requires are, the much more we can easily make much better products.” He adds: “That’s where technology will certainly bring beauty to an additional level.”
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