What if a brush could gauge the quality of your hair, tell how you’re brushing and recommend the products you should use?

This last part is the key for L’Oreal to its Kerastase smart brush, called Hair Coach. It’s how L’Oreal can communicate directly with its customers to provide intensely personalised marketing.

The brush, has been developed by Nokia’s French consumer electronics company, Withings, L’Oréal’s Research and Innovation Technology Incubator and Kerastase. The brush is equipped with Wif-fi, Bluetooth, a microphone that identifies hair frizziness, dryness, split ends and breakage by capturing sound waves as you brush, an accelerometer that counts brushing strokes, conductivity sensors that tell whether you’re brushing dry or wet hair and a gyrometer that determines brushing force and speed.

The sensors feed data via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to a mobile app, which takes into account such weather factors as humidity, temperature, UV radiation and wind. The app then provides a hair quality score, data on the effectiveness of brushing habits, personalised tips and Karastase product recommendations. The brush aims to drive traffic to salons – some of the recommended treatments are only available in-store.

It was unveiled on January 4 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas after four years of development and runs on two AA batteries and uses a combination of nylon and boar bristles. The L’Oreal incubator has also developed 3D bioprinted skin, custom-blended foundation, an augmented reality beauty app and a smart UV patch unveiled at CES last year.

And the cost? The launch price (the brush will be launched later this year) is expected to be AU$260.