The Drum | L’Oréal Professionnel Gets Voluminous With New Metaverse Hairstyle Drop

Collectively dubbed “Gravitas,” the brand new digital hairstyles “offer more opportunities for metaverse gamers to fully express themselves,” L’Oréal Professionnel writes in a press launch. As befitting the title of the brand new marketing campaign (“gravitas” is a Latin phrase which interprets into “heaviness” or “weight”), every of the brand new digital hairstyles are formed in a fashion which appear to defy the legal guidelines of physics. And that appears to be exactly the purpose – in spite of everything, bodily legal guidelines needn’t apply within the metaverse.

The Gravitas marketing campaign was developed in partnership with Wunderman Thompson, an company that has long been bullish on the metaverse.

This isn’t L’Oréal’s first digital rodeo. In November, L’Oréal Group – guardian firm to L’Oréal Professionnel – introduced that it had launched five virtual hairstyles on Prepared Participant Me, a digital avatar creation platform whose title is a play on the novel-turned-film Prepared Participant One. The outcomes from the November marketing campaign have apparently been promising sufficient to warrant the model investing extra closely into its metaverse efforts. “Thanks to the success of this first launch,” L’Oréal Professionnel wrote within the press launch, “the [Gravitas] launch will go one step further, making [L’Oréal Professionnel] the first brand to launch virtual products across multiple virtual marketplaces at the same time.”

That cross-platform element is important. Although the phrase isn’t explicitly used within the press launch, the Gravitas digital hairstyles seem to have been launched with a watch in direction of interoperability, or the potential for digital identities to stay constant throughout a number of platforms. Lengthy held up as a really perfect of metaverse true-believers, interoperability has nonetheless confirmed to date to be an obstinate technical downside, primarily because of the large quantity of computing energy that is required.

Prepared Participant Me permits customers to “explore virtual worlds with one consistent identity,” in response to its web site. The model’s LinkedIn profile claims that its avatars can be utilized throughout greater than 6,000 “compatible apps and games,” making it an influential pressure within the broader effort to constructed interoperability into the metaverse.

The Gravitas marketing campaign was created in collaboration with digital artist Evan Rochette (who additionally contributed to L’Oréal Professionnel’s earlier digital coiffure launch) and French hairstylist Charlie Le Mindu.

“We are very excited to drop these cutting-edge hairstyles as this is another milestone in our journey to crack the new codes of hair beauty and provide limitless forms of virtual self-expression,” Anne Machet, Worldwide normal supervisor at L’Oréal Professionnel, mentioned in a press release. “Because the model chief, we’re in a novel place to raise the skilled business, [digital] artists and customers to convey extra worth and augmented experiences.”

According to the press release, the launch of Gravitas across Ready Player Me, Roblox (a popular online gaming platform) and Zepeto (a South Korean mobile app) will make the five new virtual hairstyles accessible to around 234mn players and across more than 40mn virtual games.

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