Co-Founder, APPLE & BEARS
In 2024, APPLE & BEARS published a thought-leadership article under the leadership of my wife and co-founder, Kay Butt, who was CEO at the time.
The article explored a question that, at the time, still felt some way into the future: What could artificial intelligence eventually do for beauty?
We looked at personalised skincare, AI-assisted formulation, virtual experiences and the possibility that technology could one day help create products tailored much more precisely to an individual's needs. You can read Kay's original 2024 AI article here.
Two years later, something has changed.
The question is no longer whether AI will become part of beauty. It already is.
What interests me now is not simply what AI can do for a beauty brand. It is what happens when artificial intelligence moves beyond being a tool for marketing or consumer engagement and becomes part of the scientific and industrial infrastructure behind the products we make.
That is a much bigger story.
From the Digital Front Door to the Laboratory
In 2024, much of the visible AI conversation in beauty centred on things consumers could see: virtual try-ons, digital consultations, skin analysis and personalised recommendations.
Those developments were interesting, but they were only the beginning.
The more significant change may be happening behind the scenes.
Developments across global industry leaders illustrate how deeply AI is integrating into infrastructure:
- L'Oréal's strategic partnership with OpenAI (June 2026) focuses on conversational AI platforms and specialised models like GPT-Rosalind, which is being used to study the skin microbiome and accelerate the development of new skincare.
- L'Oréal's collaboration with NVIDIA (March 2026) integrates NVIDIA ALCHEMI into L'Oréal's R&I ecosystem to predict molecular behaviour and accelerate formulation discovery in the lab.
What This Means for Smaller Brands
When the largest beauty companies in the world begin embedding AI into their research and formulation pipelines, it changes the competitive landscape for everyone.
At APPLE & BEARS, we have always believed that innovation and integrity are not in conflict. We manufacture our products in England, using natural ingredients, and we care deeply about what goes into every formula.
That does not change. But what we pay attention to must.
AI in formulation is not a threat to craft or to natural beauty. Used well, it is a tool for understanding ingredients more precisely, predicting interactions more accurately, and making better decisions faster.
The question is not whether to engage with these tools. The question is how to do so in a way that remains human, values-led and genuinely in the interests of the people who use our products.
The Human Question
There is a broader conversation happening in beauty right now about who is really shaping the industry. We explored some of that in our recent piece on who really controls the beauty industry — the brand, the manufacturer, or the consumer.
AI adds another layer to that question.
If algorithms are helping to design formulations, if machine learning is predicting what consumers want before they can articulate it themselves, and if AI models are being trained on the science of skin at a scale no human team could match — then where does human judgement sit?
My answer is: at the centre. Always at the centre.
Technology should serve the people making and using the products. It should not replace the values, the craft, or the relationships that make a brand worth trusting.
Where We Go From Here
The next few years will separate the brands that use AI thoughtfully from those that use it opportunistically.
For us, that means continuing to ask the right questions — about ingredients, about formulation, about what people actually need from their skincare — and being willing to use every tool available to answer those questions well.
Embrace AI. Don't fight it.
That, to me, is where the really interesting future begins.
Dean Butt
Co-Founder, APPLE & BEARS
