Over the past three years, L’Oréal Group has been quietly assembling the perfect team, ingredient, product and marketing rollout for its next big skin-care category: longevity.
Helmed by veteran L’Oréal Group executive Vania Lacascade, a doctor of pharmacy and MBA who has spent more than 15 years with the conglomerate, the first longevity skin-care range dropped on May 1 under the Lancôme brand.
Lacascade has worked across brands for L’Oréal Group and served as the chief innovation officer from 2023 to 2025. where she readied the conglomerate for its pivot into longevity. In 2025, she became the global brand president of Lancôme, overseeing the launch.
“One of the most significant projects I had to lead was this ambitious roadmap around longevity for beauty, and now, as the president of Lancôme, I have the opportunity to bring this roadmap to life,” Lacascade told Glossy. “With this launch, [called] Absolue MD, it’s really this bridge between laboratory science and women’s daily lives.”
The term longevity has become mainstream since the Covid-19 pandemic, as the wellness industry has exploded in popularity. Longevity is defined as living a longer, healthier life. In the health and wellness fields, it’s often measured by a mix of lifespan, or how long one lives, and healthspan, or the quality of that life. How the term applies to beauty is still being decided.
“If we manage to live longer, the first priority is to live better, and what was interesting to me is, ‘How do you translate this shift when it comes to skin? When it comes to beauty?’” she said.
Lacascade told Glossy that she sees anti-aging and longevity products as complementary. For example, anti-aging is corrective: “Correcting the loss of collagen, correcting wrinkles, so those types of skin care are here to treat the symptoms and address very, very specifically different kinds of signs of aging,” she said. Meanwhile, longevity is “treating the root cause of aging,” she said.
To power the company’s vision, L’Oréal’s venture capital fund, BOLD, acquired a minority stake in Swiss biotech company Timeline in 2024. It then leveraged the company’s Mitopure ingredient, which works through cellular repair, to power L’Oréal’s first longevity skin-care launch, called Lancôme’s Absolue MD.
The new line dropped with three moisturizers made for different ages. The Anticipate cream is for those under 35 years old, while Intercept is made for those ages 35-55, and Reset was designed for who are 55-plus. Each is $155.
In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Lacascade walks host Lexy Lebsack through her vision for L’Oréal Group’s continued expansion into longevity, the Lancôme launch that kicked it off, and how the team is leveraging celebrity ambassadors like Demi Moore and Zoe Saldaña to spread the word.
On anti-aging vs. longevity
“[Anti-aging and longevity] are complementary [concepts]. … You have what I would call ‘corrective skin care — and, by the way, we have famous ranges that are addressing this part, like [Lancôme] Rénergie, which is one of our corrective lines, correcting the loss of collagen, correcting wrinkles. So, those types of skin care are here to treat the symptoms and address, very specifically, different kinds of signs of aging. … Longevity is a more proactive way of thinking about skin care, because instead of focusing on the symptoms, we are treating the root cause of aging, intervening at the biological level of the skin. And we are understanding what is happening inside the skin that is triggering them year after year, those symptoms [of aging]. So it’s a very complete, complementary vision: using a longevity skin care that will help [consumers] have an impact not only today, but also in the future.”
On longevity awareness
“The longevity wave is there. We’ve been seeing an increase in our lives for the last century. I think that everybody knows now that we will have longer lives, and I think that everybody is now aware that we need to take care of ourselves, because, in fact, we need to start to have the right habits to be able to have those years that are added to our life [to be] healthier. And longevity medicine has been advancing a lot. People now understand that good sleep, good physical exercise, taking supplements and taking care of your health before you’re seeing some symptoms is very important.”
