I love it when non-tech companies find a way to integrate technology into the fabric of modern life. That was evident when Carnival cruise lines came up with a wearable for ocean cruises last year. And it happened again this week when Germany’s 140-year-old Henkel launched its Salon Labs technology to bring hair salons into the digital age.
The technology allows beauty salons to analyze your hair’s molecular structure and get a recommendation from the Schwarzkopf Professional beauty consultants for the right kind of shampoo.
The salon can then generate the shampoo on the spot with a machine that can make hundreds of different variants.
Above: Henkel’s hair analyzer.
Image Credit: Henkel
Henkel Beauty Care will show the tech at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. In an interview with VentureBeat, Henkel marketing executive Marie-Ève Schröder said the new tech brings objective and data-driven expertise to the subjective art of caring for your hair. It enables truly custom hair products and services and helps the salon develop a deeper ongoing relationship with a customer, who can come back for multiple steps in a hair care plan.
“We want to reinvent hairdressing,” Schröder said. “We realized the world is changing so fast. Even a company like ours should explore new things.”

Above: The Henkel hair customizer develops your custom shampoo.
Image Credit: Henkel
Düsseldorf, Germany-based Henkel brought together a variety of disciplines to create the Schwarzkopf Professional SalonLab, which is a full ecosystem for quantifying and customizing hair care. It takes…