Why L’Oreal wanted to hear from these Northeastern color researchers
Professor Dimitri Mylonas and Ph.D. student Akvile Sinkeviciute spoke to L’Oreal employees about how different languages and people of different ages communicate about color.
LONDON — For a global brand like L’Oreal, a product needs to be marketable throughout the world.
But what if not all customers understand the color of the firm’s cosmetics in the same way? To address that issue, the French multinational corporation turned to Dimitris Mylonas, an associate professor in data science at Northeastern University in London, and Akvile Sinkeviciute, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science, to talk to its staff.
Mylonas appeared on the company’s radar after Veronika Marek, the head of color science for L’Oreal in the U.S., heard him give the opening keynote address in June to the Inter-Society Color Council conference in Rochester, New York. Mylonas had talked about his research into ways different languages communicate about color.
For more than 15 years, Mylonas, a former visual communication designer, has been researching color and languages. He said it has been found that, while there are approximately 10 core color names in most languages, a native speaker is “able to use about 30 to 50 color names without any additional training”. For every core color, like red, there is an offshoot, such as burgundy.
“We can see thousands of different colors,” continued Mylonas. “But these are being somehow compressed into a much smaller set of color names.”
His research, using technology and mass data surveys, has set out to map how different languages describe colors.
Marek invited Mylonas and Sinkeviciute, who also addressed the ISCC conference, to give a virtual talk to about 80 employees at the world’s largest cosmetics company as part of her “Color Science Insights” series, which invites external experts to present their work.
Mylonas told Northeastern Global News that the main message of his talk was that not all colors have a universal meaning in every international market due to variations in the local language.
Giving an example, he said that in English there is a “unitary” word for blue, whereas in Greek, there are two separate words — γαλάζιο (ghalazio) for light blue and κυανό (kyano) for dark blue. This is true in Russian, Thai and other languages, Mylonas added.
Some producers “assume there’s somehow a universal color categorization and that all languages easily translate from one to the other,” said Mylonas. “But this is not exactly true.”
He said L’Oreal, as an international brand, was keen to understand the “dynamic approach” required when selecting or communicating about colors across a wide range of cultures.
“If you have a system that can adapt to different markets, where people speak different languages, then you can achieve a much better color communication — that was the whole idea,” said Mylonas.
Such a change has the potential to improve customer satisfaction and drive down return rates of L’Oreal’s cosmetic products, he argued, especially those that have strong color descriptions, such as hair dyes.
“From the market data I have seen for global returns, about 7% to 10% are due to it being the wrong color,” Mylonas continued. “That could mean, if you put this practice in the global e-commerce market, it could be a big fix. Every percentage by which you shrink that headline figure down, the better it will be in terms of profit margins, logistics and sustainability.”
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During her part of the presentation to L’Oreal, Sinkeviciute shared her research on the way younger and older people regard colors differently.
By collecting English language data through online surveys, she has discovered that older people tend to use fewer color names to describe what they see. “There is a color vocabulary richness that declines with age,” Sinkeviciute explained.
Sinkeviciute said the audience at L’Oreal was intrigued to understand why that is. It is also a question she hopes to shed some light on by the time her thesis has been submitted.
Theories include that older people were not exposed to as many colors as people in their twenties are, or that, as previous generations have aged, consensus has grown around how shades of colors fit into the 10 to 12 core color types.
But it could also be due to aging, Sinkeviciute said. “There could be reasons, like for example, low-level color vision declining with age due to the lens of the eye yellowing as it gets exposed to more and more ultraviolet light,” she said. “So that could be another reason why older people would tend to group more colors under one color name.”
Marek, who moved from L’Oreal’s Paris office to take-up her current post, said the presentations given by the Northeastern academics had given her research and innovation team pause for thought when it came to thinking about designing colors, and also about how to market them globally.
“Color is the number one factor that drives what you want to buy,” Marek told Northeastern Global News. “Make-up is all about color, hair color is all about color.”
As a worldwide brand, she said it would be “impossible” to launch distinct products for each of their core markets, which includes the U.S., China and France. Instead, she said Mylonas and Sinkeviciute had helped convey how the brand could communicate in more tailored ways about what it is selling.
“We can definitely adjust how we talk and communicate about this product — all the advertising we are doing around it, maybe how our models speak when they are on TV, and also what we put on the package,” Marek added.
“The main takeaway for me is this awareness that they [L’Oreal’s researchers] know that there are different ways of communicating about color, and this is something that is worth exploring and thinking about when they’re developing a product.”
