From her upbringing in Cyprus to her training as an engineer and career in public health, Ezgi Barcenas has a background as multifaceted as the organization she works for.
L’Oréal’s recently minted global chief sustainability officer, ahead of a New York trip for Climate Week, said each facet of her path has informed her approach to the sustainability efforts she oversees at beauty’s largest conglomerate.
“I was born and raised in Cyprus, which is highly water-stressed. I became very aware of our finite resources at a very, very young age,” Barcenas said. “I thought about how our resources are finite, but also circularity, and how we need to find ways to respect the world.”
Now, Barcenas oversees such efforts as L’Oréal’s Climate Emergency Fund, the company’s Fund for Nature Regeneration and its L’Oréal for the Future program, which set sustainability targets for the group to reach by 2030.
“I’m an engineer by training, and science became a way for me to explore solutions,” Barcenas said. “Sustainability became more of a passion, and the more I witnessed what was happening around the world, the more apparent it became to me how urgent it is.”
In a business ecosystem that touches on product manufacturing, burgeoning technologies and even financial investment, Barcenas’ methodical approach informs how she looks at every facet of L’Oréal’s operations.
“We always talk about how the company was born out of science, and it’s true. We have thousands of scientists around the world working on unlocking the power of a molecule, or rethinking product design, from ingredients to formula to packaging,” she said.
To that end, she has many levers to pull. On the financial side, for example, L’Oréal’s BOLD venture capital arm invested in Abolis Biotechnologies to help scale sustainably minded ingredient production; earlier this year, it announced a partnership with biotech company Debut to create bio-identical ingredients with the same goal.
Pointing to L’Oréal’s partnership with Cosmo International Fragrances, Barcenas explained how the company can couple cutting-edge innovation from start-ups with its own infrastructural might.
“It is very rare to discover a new extraction process. We announced an exclusive partnership with Cosmo International Fragrances, a start-up that brings green science extraction processes to revolutionize the way we extract fragrances,” she said. “It’s waterless, it’s a slow process, and reveals the exact smell of the ingredient while preserving its integrity.”
That technique has since been implemented in new launches.
“This is in one of the most recent launches from Valentino. It didn’t exist, we found it, we’re learning from it, piloting it and will scale it,” Barcenas continued. “Science is not linear, it’s exponential.”
Barcenas is also betting on the conglomerate’s size to influence consumer behavior. “We’re seeing early signals of consumer habits in new categories, for example, with perfumes,” she said. “We created refillable packaging to instill this circular behavior, and we’ve received good feedback.”
As for what attracted Barcenas to beauty — and L’Oréal specifically — in the first place, it’s the organization’s commercial and emotional power in consumers’ lives, which also allows it to influence consumption behaviors.
“If you want to be at the forefront of innovation, we push ourslves to ask the toughest questions and to understand the consumer challenges in the most accessible and inclusive way possible. That’s the role the beauty industry can play,” she said. “L’Oréal, with its resources, reach and scale can bring a diverse set of partners together to help tackle a problem.”
