ABB Robots in Beauty, From Bottles to Manicures

Perfume was once bottled by hand. Now ABB robots handle cosmetic glass at Gerresheimer, and robot manicures are moving from salons into the home.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/23/20261 min read

Beauty products were made by hand for a long time. A 1934 photo from the Lido cosmetics factory in Tel Aviv shows women pouring perfume into bottles one at a time from glass jugs. Creams and lipsticks were filled and boxed by hand in much the same way for decades afterward.

Black and white photo of two women filling perfume bottles from glass jugs
Black and white photo of two women filling perfume bottles from glass jugs

Workers bottling perfume at the Lido cosmetics factory in Tel Aviv, 1934. Photo: Zoltan Kluger / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots reached the containers before the products. At Gerresheimer in Essen, a glassworks founded in 1723 that makes bottles and jars for the pharma and cosmetics industries, ABB robots place up to several hundred bottles a minute from the cooling conveyors onto carriers. Other ABB robots pack them into trays, and a large IRB 6700 palletizes them.

Row of orange ABB robots above a conveyor of glass bottles
Row of orange ABB robots above a conveyor of glass bottles

ABB robots handling glass bottles at Gerresheimer in Essen. Photo: ABB

Robots are now moving into the salon chair as well. On September 1, Aurami announced an at-home manicure device that scans each nail and uses a small robotic arm to paint it, taking about 30 seconds per nail. 10Beauty's robot manicure stations are already being piloted at Ulta.

Nail technician filing a customer's nails at a table full of color samples
Nail technician filing a customer's nails at a table full of color samples

A nail technician at work in a salon. Photo: PattayaPatrol / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cosmetics packing is mostly small, light items moving fast, which is the job ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker was built for. At Gerresheimer, ABB's MultiMove software lets one controller coordinate up to four robots, so several arms can share a line without getting in each other's way.

ABB FlexPicker delta robots placing products into cases on a packing line
ABB FlexPicker delta robots placing products into cases on a packing line

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

Smaller brands making short runs could use a GoFa cobot to pack gift sets or fill display trays next to staff. It is easy to reteach when the seasonal range changes, and it can work without a fence.

White ABB GoFa cobot arm working at a table
White ABB GoFa cobot arm working at a table

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

At home, robot manicures are arriving as countertop gadgets. I'd expect the arm on the vanity to take on other fiddly grooming jobs later. The accuracy it needs comes from the same camera-guided motion that ABB robots use on packing lines every day.

Rows of nail polish bottles in many shades on a shelf
Rows of nail polish bottles in many shades on a shelf

Rows of nail polish on a store display. Photo: Joe Shlabotnik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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