Barbara Lavernos may have been at L’Oréal for 34 years, but she has never seen such radical shifts in the beauty industry as there are currently.

“The last years have been accelerating in terms of change like never before. Exponentially,” Lavernos, a trained engineer and chemist, who is now L’Oréal’s deputy chief executive officer, said at the 2025 WWD Beauty Inc Catalysts conference earlier this month, in conversation with Beauty Inc editor in chief Jenny B. Fine.

In regard to the consumer, they’re more educated and knowledgable about beauty than ever. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “We don’t have to teach them anything. They know so much.”

At the same time, there are now no beauty archetypes for these consumers, a fact that Lavernos loves.

“Some decades ago, there was one arche

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