To mark CEW France’s “Journé de la Beauté 2026”, an innovative session broke with the usual round-table format. Olivier Parent (Director of Prospective Studies at Comptoir Prospectiviste), Frédérique Lenglen (Strategic Communications Advisor) and Karine Cottin (Senior Advisor, Inspire Positive Change) presented the Biotech 2045 Forecasting Capsule, a project initiated by Jean-Yves Berthon, Chairman of Greentech, in partnership with Burson and Comptoir Prospectiviste. The task: to imagine four possible futures for the cosmetics industry over the next 20 years.
Olivier Parent set out the intellectual framework from the outset. Foresight is not an oracle. It is a tool for understanding the present in the light of what tomorrow might bring. “Foresight is only relevant to the present,” he summarises. The method brought together around twenty experts across three workshops, using science fiction as a starting point. These workshops produced a 120-page report (freely available) setting out eight scenarios.
Four of these were presented at the Journée de la Beauté.
Governed bodies
The first scenario is the most worrying. In 2045, biological data (DNA, behaviour, cellular signals) are constantly collected by governments and biotechnology companies. The body has become a space of measured and governed performance. This transformation did not happen overnight. It crept into everyday life through services that have become indispensable: predictive healthcare, automated diagnosis, DNA profiling.
“Little by little, your body will come to resemble a remotely controlled social network,” explains Frédérique Lenglen.
One can therefore imagine cosmetics capable of disrupting facial recognition algorithms. Creams containing visible or invisible pigments, or masks that interfere with cameras’ ability to read facial features. “These are cosmetics that protect your individual freedom,” says Karine Cottin.
