Beauty’s Leading Female Scientists Talk Innovation, Experimentation and Representation

La Roche-Posay’s Mela B3 Serum might look inconspicuous on a shelf with its white label and apothecary bottle. But its hero ingredient — the multipatented Melasyl — represents 18 years of research on the part of parent company L’Oréal and a search that involved 100,000 molecules.

Indeed, for those behind the curtain at beauty’s most innovative companies, each launch is the culmination of years of research and years of experimenting and iterating.

For many women in STEM, though, that curtain is made of glass.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that women comprised just 28 percent of the STEM workforce as of last year. Internationally, that figure drops considerably, with women holding only 17 percent of those roles in the EU and 14 percent in India.

In beauty, the picture is more positive. From trailblazing female founders to the industry, the pendulum is swinging in terms of gender equity. Here, Beauty Inc gathered five leading women in STEM beauty roles to analyze the progress made and the challenges that remain.  

The Panelists:

Rukeyser Thompson, PhD

Senior Director, Global Hair Care R&D, P&G

Rukeyser Thompson is the senior director of global hair care research and development at Procter & Gamble, where she got her start as a scientist nearly 20 years ago. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Alcorn State University and a PhD in chemistry at Purdue University.

Janet Wangari-Olivero, PhD

Assistant Vice President of Advanced Research, L’Oréal USA

The assistant vice president of advanced research at L’Oréal USA, Janet Wangari-Olivero immigrated to the U.S. from Kenya more than 20 years ago, obtaining her bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Montclair State University and a PhD in cell and developmental biology from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Jaime Emmetsberger, PhD

Director, R&D Advanced Technology Pioneering, the Estée Lauder Cos.

Jaime Emmetsberger has spent nearly a decade at the Estée Lauder Cos., having worked her way from principal scientist at La Mer to her current role. She received both her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and her PhD in molecular and cellular pharmacology from Stony Brook University.

Jasmina Aganovic

Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Future Society and Arcaea

Jasmina Aganovic launched Arcaea in 2021 in an aim to sustainably engineer beauty ingredients through biotech. Informed by the same ethos, she incubated fine fragrance brand, Future Society, in 2023. Aganovic received her bachelor’s degree in chemical and biological engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sophie Bai

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pavise and B.A.I. Biosciences

The founder and CEO of biotech incubator B.A.I. Biosciences and its subbrand Pavise, Sophie Bai was born and raised in China’s Henan province. She came to the U.S. to get her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with a concentration in biomedical engineering, and later obtained an MBA from Harvard Business School.

What have each of your career paths, and being women in STEM fields, been like?

Jasmina Aganovic: My career was a twisty journey. I graduated from college with a technical degree and immediately knew I wanted to go into beauty. I applied to all the big companies and didn’t get a job, so I started calling my favorite brands asking if they needed any sort of help. That was how I got my foot in the door.

I worked at Fresh, then Living Proof. It was a start-up and I had to wear multiple hats. I was on the floor at Sephora and on QVC, which was a watershed moment. I saw that the translation of science was a big puzzle to figure out, and that’s where my career took me, in this direction of translating science through brands and products.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: I moved here from Kenya about 22 years ago, and I came to the U.S. without a strong STEM background. The only inspiration I had was my former biology teacher, so all I knew was that I would go to school and be a bio teacher. I was in college for 14 years, my PhD work was on developing therapies for skin cancer, which is how I got into dermatology and beauty.

One of the connections I saw was that inequities in medicine translated to inequities in beauty products. Ten years ago, I went to Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products. I did bench work but also saw the business side. A few years later, I came to L’Oréal, where my job is to bridge the gap between consumer products, medical products and provide equitable access to products that work for everyone.

Jaime Emmetsberger: I never thought I was going to be in the cosmetics industry. Most of the stuff I was doing was medical research, but one day I saw an advertisement saying “we do cell biology” for Lauder. I would have never thought that cosmetics companies did this type of research. I applied to the company, and here I am. I do a lot of molecular biology, a lot of looking at how ingredients function and translating them into products.

Rukeyser Thompson: I grew up in Mississippi on a farm, and my mom was a teacher. I got a PhD in chemistry, and my area of expertise was analytical. I explored opportunities that I thought could exist in government, and wound up in industry.

I started off in P&G doing product research in the laundry division. I’ve worked in body and hair care, where I am now. I’m always finding the times when I’m traveling globally to think about the little girl who grew up in this country town who didn’t see anybody doing this, but I was surrounded by a community that told me I can be anything I want to be. As I’ve either been one of a few women or the only women of color in a lot of classrooms, my goal has always been for it to not stay that way.

Sophie Bai: I grew up in a small town in China. My province is 200 million people and not a single good school or hospital, so my parents told me that in order to get opportunities, I needed hard skills. I started competing in math and science when I was 7 years old. Losing was not an option, and I won competitions internationally.

I never personally thought about a career in beauty because I thought I was going to cure cancer. Then, I went to finance and had a career there for almost a decade. Looking around at others in that profession, I didn’t feel like I was one of them. I decided I would talk to my friends from my finance career and start a lab.

What do you love most about what you do?

Sophie Bai: When I was 11, I was kicked out of a public speaking contest. They said I was ugly and they didn’t want to hear my speech about how youth can contribute to society. It changed my personality. Science made me comfortable. I don’t have to feel insecure about what I love, and I don’t have to worry about what people think of me. What I loved was being able to find truth and solutions that help people. Only science and technology can do that. It’s why I love drug discovery, and that’s basically what we do daily.

Rukeyser Thompson: What I love about science and what I loved about chemistry in high school was that it reminded me of time I spent baking with my grandmother. There is this creativity that happens. The creativity comes in when you realize, “Hey, this is written down — it’s not working.” And “what if?” — the power of those two words, science gives you that. When you think about research and development, there’s never a perfect answer. Sometimes it works, and then when it doesn’t work, you ask what you need to do.

Jaime Emmetsberger: I changed majors multiple times, but it was always around biology. I found that the body is made so beautifully and intelligently, the evolution of how our cells are able to develop complex organs that talk to each other. How do they do that and how do they communicate? That’s what I’ve always strived to answer. It often comes down to troubleshooting, and that’s the fun part — the creative aspect of how to change a recipe or design.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: Everybody washes their face, brushes their teeth, gets in a car. When I switched my career to personal care, someone from my PhD thesis committee told me they were disappointed. But I thought about the impact that things that are not drugs or medical devices, and are used everyday, have. It’s very different to be able to serve a global population, and we have to think about diversity of people and what makes them unique when it comes to skin care and hair texture. Those are all driven by biology.

Jasmina Aganovic: Science has always made me feel hopeful. Tomorrow hasn’t yet been determined and it makes me feel like I have a bit of agency around what tomorrow can look like. As an entrepreneur, you’re also a creator, and creating something from nothing is exciting, and using science as a creative medium has always been exciting.

Rukeyser, Jamie and Janet, you’ve been in your roles for years. What is a piece of wisdom you have today that you wish you had known when you first entered the field?

Janet Wangari-Olivero: Be curious, be open minded. It can be challenging, but it’s active and fulfilling. For me, it’s always been about saying yes to different opportunities, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable.

Rukeyser Thompson: My phrase is be comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s where it all happens. I’ve stepped into a lot of places where I’ve been excited to learn and figure it out — that’s also where mentors and coaches can help you.

Jaime Emmetsberger: For me, there’s two aspects. It’s OK to be uncomfortable because you go out into the unknown and take on and learn different skills. The other important one is your point of view and opinion. In many cases, people are afraid to speak up and speak their opinion, because it’s not universal. But your point of view provides insight or a new outlook, and that’s where we can build from.

How have you seen the beauty industry evolve in terms of STEM roles, and where is there still work to be done?

Jaime Emmetsberger: Historically, the majority of STEM and leadership roles were held by men. That has shifted. At Lauder, we are predominantly women. We’ve pushed for providing opportunities for women in STEM and the founder of our company was a woman. That being said, there’s always opportunity to grow.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: When you look at L’Oréal, across key strategic positions, close to 55 percent are held by women. That’s a sign of tremendous growth. Last year, many of the patents actually came from female inventors.

Women are underrepresented in the majority of the U.S. workforce, and we have to ask what changes we can make to ensure that we have a stronger pipeline. We can always do better. We have programs that cater to supporting people under 30, understanding opportunities in beauty, and we’ve had a program that helps to fund five female postdocs with research grant funding.

Jaime Emmetsberger: We are, as a beauty community, wholeheartedly going out there. And it’s teaching young girls and women the understanding that we’re in STEM and it’s okay to be in STEM. How many women are actually going into STEM and staying is probably more of a societal or cultural change that needs to occur. But we want to capture these girls at a young age and say, “it’s OK — you’re brilliant.”

Rukeyser Thompson: I love that because I see a trend, around the time girls get to middle school, they are discouraged from taking harder classes in math and science. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean that you walk away.

Jasmina Aganovic: It’s inspiring to see the evolution of the beauty industry and embracing all different forms of expression. It’s the whole point of this industry. In its origins, women weren’t in leadership positions or inventing technologies. When we get more women, we’re going to see fundamental shifts in claims and how products talk to people. A lot of that has historically been rooted in lack, and that’s going to shift to a place of empowerment.

Sophie Bai: There are two separate issues. One is women in STEM, and we have actually come a long way. Now at MIT, women are there at about 40 percent. There’s been a drastic improvement, but there’s also a long way to go. When I would go to medical conferences, people would ask if my company was my passion project. This isn’t my passion project, this is my passion. But some people still don’t think that beauty is a serious science.

When women make it into STEM, what are the biggest roadblocks for them?

Jasmina Aganovic: There’s a politicking always, and certain power dynamics come into play. Oftentimes, women have societal expectations of how they’re supposed to show up. Men are often told to be more empathetic, sit with people, ask questions — and yet, when we women do many of those things, it’s overlooked. You’re being soft or “too” empathetic. Throughout my career, when I have tried to be direct and clear about my expectations, people perceive it in a different way. I’ve been called intense. These things can be really discouraging. There’s this invisible thing that you are experiencing, and you have to be very mindful of that, otherwise you will drive yourself crazy.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: Sometimes you walk into a room, and depending on whatever dimension of diversity you fill in, you feel like an outlier. At L’Oréal, we try to create safe spaces. We have three different employee resource groups for women. But we also have to consider the other elements that women deal with, like being parents or new caretakers. Also, across the industry, we know some women drop out of the STEM career path because they’ve had children. Can you imagine how hard it is to get back once you’ve been out of the industry for a few years?

Jaime Emmetsberger: I’m a mother, and I feel the caregiver challenge. Coming back to society and culture, it’s still seen as the moral, women-driven role to be that caregiver and not necessarily men. They may leave their role, or not accelerate in leadership. Then there is unconscious bias. When I was in school and I had long nails, people would ask me how I could even fit them in gloves. Being a woman and being feminine — going in and expressing yourself how you want each day — needs to shift culturally.

Jasmina Aganovic: There was this woman in school, a year younger than me, and she loved fashion and was a bioinformatician. She was a nerdy-nerd, but didn’t look like it. It made me curious about if I loved fashion, and it just cracked open my mind. This woman existing created permission to be whatever I wanted.

Sophie Bai: I once was called prickly, and now I’m looking for a fragrance that smells like prickly pear [laughs]. We should, as women, feel proud about taking up space and speaking more. Some of us speak loudly and some of us are reserved. There are 100 ways to be a leader.

Rukeyser Thompson: You can be a scientist with pink glasses, big red curly hair, really cute shoes and long nails — and be brilliant and changing the world.

Rukeyser, you work on so many varied types of hair textures in your role. What impact has representation had in the work your lab puts out?

Rukeyser Thompson: We are designing products for consumers around the globe, and to do that, the people who work there have to look like the consumers we’re designing for. The change I have been able to bring is making sure that textured hair consumers are part of the work that we do. They are fundamentally included in front-end innovation. When I’m in a consumer’s home that has limited space, or hard water, I need to understand those conditions and the impacts that are products have on their hair texture. We have to understand habits, practices and wash frequencies. All of those things are important.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: When it comes to research, you cannot formulate without understanding consumers, whether it’s biology or need and aspirations from beauty. Part of my job is ensuring we understand what we’re being asked for and not just handing them what we develop. A lot of the things that we consider from a diversity perspective is rooted in science, then understanding what they want and ultimately, what they desire.

What does it take to scale these technologies on the cutting edge?

Jasmina Aganovic: It wouldn’t be called science if we knew what was going to happen. You have to have a product road map, but you know those timelines are going to change. One of the ways we manage that is through a mixed portfolio rather than just a singular thing. You will have accelerants and setbacks, and planning for that as a young company and a startup is part of the process.

Jaime Emmetsberger: You have low hanging fruit, and things that are really pushed out. There are struggles with the regulatory environment that you sometimes can’t predict. You might have something that is biologically outstanding, and then it might get shut down. We’re also looking at how science is changing and what fields are emerging.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: We also have to consider the impact what we’re delivering has on the environment. And we also understand the regulatory systems to really anticipate what’s to come. L’Oréal stopped testing on animals years before that rule went into effect in the EU, and the challenge is to understand what your future consumer will be looking for.

Rukeyser Thompson: Being a global company, the EU has always been a bit more challenging for us to innovate in. Understanding what the challenges are, how it’s going to shift — once you figure out how this product makes a difference in a consumer’s life, you figure out how to do it. For us, it’s with less ingredients or ones that have less of a carbon footprint.

Sophie Bai: Beauty is fast-moving, but science is neither fast nor moving. We created a UV filter and you all know how difficult that is, but we didn’t know that coming into this. I didn’t know until I was halfway deep. I had no idea it would be so challenging, but we did it, and in that way, us being industry outsiders was a blessing in disguise.

Jaime, you drive science at La Mer, a company with a huge marketing and brand image presence. What’s effective in communicating scientific innovations to consumers?

Jaime Emmetsberger: It’s always a challenge. Sometimes science is really deep. I usually collaborate with great teams, making diagrams and visuals that can make a consumer understand that. It’s about taking the exact mechanism of action, making it as simple as possible. If the consumer doesn’t grasp it, then it doesn’t matter.

Sophie and Jasmina, what’s been effective in driving education around your technologies?

Sophie Bai: We launched Pavise last year in late March — right after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. All of our money was in there, so we basically canceled all of our campaigns and put our website out cold. To our surprise, we got a large volume of consumers purchasing on our site — 40 percent of them being men. We weren’t building the brand, but our language of science attracted them. Then we did an ad with condoms drawing the line between sun safety and safe sex, and that attracted more men. The obstacle is balancing very complex science and telling it in a simple way — it’s still one we haven’t fully figured out yet.

Jasmina Aganovic: Our company mission is to make biology the most desired technology in the beauty industry in the eyes of the consumer. We figured out this playbook of telling biology-centric stories. Fragrance was an interesting way to start because it’s associated with marketing and human storytelling, not science. But I thought it would be interesting to show how science can enable new forms of creativity. It was less about educating people on DNA sequencing, and more on the fantasy of extinct flowers.

But you have to pay attention to the whole dynamic of consumers. We kept the science pretty high level, and the #PerfumeTok community wanted to understand how it was done, how it was possible. They wanted access to all of that information.

We’ve heard so much buzz in recent years around new ingredient technologies, AI, etc. What is the next frontier?

Rukeyser Thompson: That next frontier is giving consumers shampoos that give them the hair that they want, but with fewer ingredients — ones that are good for them — and formulated in a way that’s good for the planet.

Jaime Emmetsberger: I’m not going to say AI is the end-all, but it’s definitely an ally to innovation. We have so much space in working through our processes, and it does have a propensity for biological innovation and even for products. We can make fast decisions on safety profiles and ingredient interactions. You can go down a pipeline of 2,000 ingredients and narrow it down to maybe 20.

Janet Wangari-Olivero: I see the notion of inclusivity as next. Beauty isn’t just about how you look, it’s about how you feel and how you function. Therefore, there is this need for holistic, integrated care. We see a lot of consumers engaging with wellness — we want to make sure they look younger and function at a higher level for a longer time.

Jasmina Aganovic: At Arcaea, we often show the tree of life, and this visual of everything in nature. With the mix of AI and biotechnology, we can start to access molecules in other parts of the tree of life ethically and sustainably. What we can learn from nature, and how can we think about that in novel ways?

Sophie Bai: Beauty, in the past, has put science in the backseat. Science is always evolving — you have biology, AI, physics and engineering. That, by nature, will lead to innovations in all of the respective areas. Hyperpigmentation and hair loss are still unsolved because dermatology is deemed a forgotten therapeutic area compared to cardiology, immunology and oncology. A lot of those advancements haven’t been applied as therapies for skin. And consumers are demanding this type of medicine. They want it to work. So that’s what we’re focused on — solution-oriented innovations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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