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L’Oréal’s New Technology Allows for Bioprinting Hair Follicles

L'Oreal and Poietis are teaming up in hopes of making some serious breakthroughs in hair care. (Photo: Getty Images)
L’Oréal and Poietis are teaming up in hopes of making some serious breakthroughs in hair care. (Photo: Getty Images)

L’Oréal has joined forces with the biotechnology firm Poietis to help figure out how to make your hair look as fleeky as possible. The two companies are hoping to bioprint a hair follicle, using a 3D printer, in hopes that they can create a working follicle that can produce hair for product testing.

Hair follicles are shaped differently depending on your hair texture, so hopefully, L’Oréal has plans to create follicles of all types to test. This could herald a breakthrough in hair care for all textures — and hypothetically, put an end to animal testing.

“The laser-assisted bioprinting technology developed by Poietis to produce biological tissue can position cells in 3D with extremely high cellular resolution (on the order of ten microns) and cellular viability (over 95%),” the press release explains. This technique layers micro-drops of bioinks using a quick scan with a laser beam. The living biological tissue created must be matured for three weeks before it can be used in tests. A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently created programmable 3D printed hair, so clearly, this is a burgeoning area of research.

Here’s to new breakthroughs in healthy hair… and new products in the future!

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