While the beauty industry is equipping itself with ever-faster image generators, L’Oréal has just added a tool of a different kind to its in-house studio: a meter that measures, frame by frame, how much electricity each creation consumes. The move is subtle. Yet it speaks volumes about the unease that mass production is beginning to generate even within the industry’s own ranks.
A production line with no friction
For several seasons now, L’Oréal has built a network of technology partnerships around its CreateTech program—the content lab led by Thomas Alves Machado—including NVIDIA, Google and its Gemini model, Adobe and its Firefly Services, ByteDance, and now OpenAI. Added to this are collaborations with startups like OMI, which combine 3D digital twins and AI-generated imagery to place an object within a completely reconstructed setting. The result, demonstrated on the group’s internal platform: an advertising visual, from sketch to final image, in just a few steps—without a studio, without a set, and without production delays as the industry has long known them.
This speed has an immediate advantage, which Thomas Alves Machado states bluntly: it frees up creative time for the marketing teams at the group’s fashion houses, who can now sketch out an idea and see it take shape before they’ve even left the meeting where it was conceived. But a frictionless image factory is also one without natural limits. Nothing in the technical architecture itself slows down production. On the contrary, everything is designed to speed it up.
The meter behind the screen
It was precisely this realization that led L’Oréal to introduce a CO2 emissions calculator at the heart of CreateTech. The tool does more than just display an abstract number: it converts the computational power required for each image or video generated into units that the mind can easily grasp—kilometers traveled by car, hours of video streaming. Every in-house creator can see, in real time, what their request cost before even running it a second time.
The wording used by L’Oréal to justify this decision is worth noting verbatim: refusing to fall into the trap of compulsive consumption. The expression implies an implicit diagnosis—that technical ease, by its very nature, leads to unrestrained use—and a response that is not a cap but rather transparency. The tool does not restrict production in any way. It informs the producer.
Details
CreateTech’s CO2 calculator converts the computational energy consumption of each image or video generation into easily understandable equivalents—kilometers driven by car, hours of streaming—calculated in real time for each creation within the program’s technology ecosystem (NVIDIA, Google Gemini, Adobe Firefly Services, ByteDance, OpenAI).
A display of restraint; discretion left to the individual
One question remains that the tool, by its very design, does not address: what do we do with consumption data once it is visible? Measuring is not the same as capping. The gauge informs the creator, but it does not set any collective carbon budget or threshold beyond which an additional generation would be denied. It shifts responsibility from the industrial scale to the individual action—exactly where, in traditional craftsmanship, frugality was imposed by the scarcity of materials or the slow pace of the craft, not by a counter on a screen.
This can be seen as a step—the first in a process that is meant to be completed. It can also be seen as the current limitation of a line of reasoning that identifies the problem—the infinite nature of generation comes at a cost—without yet providing the means to address it other than by highlighting it. The difference between these two interpretations does not stem from any statement of intent. It will become apparent in what L’Oréal chooses—or does not choose—to measure next: no longer the image, but the actual use made of the counter itself.
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