L’Oreal's precision hair coloring device is the end of home dye job disasters

Ahead of CES 2022, L’Oréal has announced tech that improves hair color application at the salon, the bathroom sink, and beyond.

Home box dye kits can make an amateur colorist feel like a mad scientist. With a mess of potions arranged on a bathroom counter, a massive set of instructions, and a tin foil hat on your head, your home hair dye experience may feel more like a chemistry-lab-gone-wrong than salon bliss. L’Oréal wants to change that. Over a century after the company released the first synthetic hair dye in 1907, it’s announced a device for easy at-home hair coloring that aims to hit shelves in early 2023.

Meet Colorsonic — About the size of a flattening iron, Colorsonic is meant to make home coloring almost as simple as brushing your hair. You can choose your shade on the spot: Colorsonic allows users to select one of 40 colors, and it’ll mix the corresponding developer and formula on-demand. Then, as you brush your hair from root to end, the device will dispense the mixture via a nozzle that oscillates over 300 times per minute to consistently apply your color of choice.

Need a quick touch-up? Colorsonic cartridges store the unused pigments and developer separately, so you can stash your leftovers and touch up later with perfect portions of freshly-mixed dye.

Not only does the device’s on-demand dye mixing cut down on wasted hair dye, but it also can cut down on single-use materials. Colorsonic’s recyclable cartridges use less plastic per application than home box hair color, the company says in a press release.

Coming to a store near you... eventually — The Colorsonic has been in development for five years, but it’s still not quite ready to hit shelves. L’Oréal plans to release test batches at the end of this year with a large-scale launch in early 2023. The company has not disclosed how much it will cost.

AI hair color — At-home colorists aren’t the only ones getting new beauty tech. Salons can check out Colorright, an AI-connected hair color system that uses “Virtual Try-on to project desired shades” and an “algorithm that leads to an on-demand, customized hair color with more than 1500 custom shades.”

The machine will analyze the client’s hair to determine a personal hair color formula with over 1,500 possibilities. Factors measured include hair color, gray percentage, length, and density. Colorsonic will combine base creams, developers, and diluters to create an “ultra-precise” hair color formula.