To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Meet Natalia, the brown-eyed brunette who helps train Dermalogica’s skin professionals on how its new Awaken peptide eye gel can help remedy tired eyes. Her goal is to train as many as 100,000 individuals worldwide following the launch of the gel this month. That sounds like hard work, but overtime and overwork aren’t concerns for Natalia because she isn’t real. She’s Dermalogica’s first virtual human, created to train the Unilever-owned brand’s network of professionals about skin science.
Natalia was developed by Dermalogica’s global education team and designed not to resemble any particular race or age. She is accessible on internal platforms and comes to life in videos and VR simulations, where she realistically simulates the aging process, helping learners to better understand skin conditions.
“Beauty brands usually invest highly in consumer-facing assets, but we did this because one of our core values is education,” says Tabby Zamani, head of global education at Dermalogica. “Arming skin therapists with a high level of education will allow them to be more knowledgeable about the product and, at the end of the day, increase business.”
Before the advent of the extremely well informed Natalia, Dermalogica trained its network of staff using real-life case studies and before-and-after photos. The new technology acts as an additional visual tool to help enhance existing education practices, says Zamani. She declined to share a figure on the investment costs for the project.
In recent years, retail has experimented extensively with virtual reality. Dermalogica sees an opportunity to exploit its potential for training. “We thought about how to create a learning environment that would have a higher level of retention,” says Zamani. Learning with Natalia is fun, she says, and there is growing evidence that learners retain more from immersive training rather than a traditional classroom setting.
VR: Corporate training potential
VR was born out of the earliest flight simulators, designed back in 1929, says Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “The point was to encourage trainees to try new things, make mistakes and learn from them, and to innovate new ways to solve problems. This approach also works perfectly in the beauty domain.”
Strivr, a virtual reality immersive learning platform provider, of which Bailenson is also co-founder, is currently working with media company MGM to enable employees to practice and improve how they talk to hotel guests. “The biggest opportunity for VR with beauty brands will be training employees to improve conversations and rapport with customers to improve the experience,” says Bailenson.
Dermalogica isn’t the first beauty brand to use VR for corporate training. In 2016, L’Oréal launched a virtual reality-based programme for hair stylists to learn new techniques. Named the Matrix Academy, it positions the user, who wears a VR headset, in a salon to watch select hair styles created by a professional. Shot in 360 degree video, viewers can engage with the scene from all angles.
