March 24, 2026

by Lauren Ferguson

Luannee Hernandez ‘26 dyed her dark hair to a light caramel brown last summer.

The Ramapo College of New Jersey marketing major did not make the move just because she felt like a change. Her new look was also for research purposes.

“I wanted to dye my hair to learn how the consumer thinks,” said Hernandez, of Carteret, NJ.

Hernandez spent 12 weeks last summer as a marketing intern for the L’Oreal Paris hair color team. She commuted to the major beauty corporation’s United States headquarters at Hudson Yards in New York City. The Roadrunner was tasked with developing a multicultural marketing strategy to target generation X and boomer Latinas for its Magic Root brand – a cover-up hair spray that temporarily colors roots.

“I wanted to see how fast my roots grow after I dye my hair and then how that impacts what I do. Like, do I go to the salon, or do I use this spray?” she explained. “I did use the spray myself and I wanted to evaluate how that felt for me and see if, in terms of the target market, how can I make that more relatable and more of something that is desirable of a product for them to use.”

She also brought a couple of cans home for her mother to experiment with. “Just being able to step into the consumer’s mind and mentality is super important,” she said.

At L’Oreal, Hernandez had access to cross-functional teams – such as demand planning, sales and marketing – to support her project in areas such as designing copy and packaging ideas. She also worked with the hair color team at L’Oreal’s tech center, who do hair and look at the science or formula behind products and how they impact different types of hair.

“Working with all those people that are very much experts in hair color, the history of it, what kind of competitors have been able to come into the space and how they have been able to adjust to that is really, really cool,” she said.

As an intern for the L’Oreal Paris hair color team, Luannee Hernandez ’26 created a multicultural marketing strategy for the Magic Root brand.

Ultimately, Hernandez presented a marketing plan, which included sending a dual mother/daughter pack of Magic Root to select beauty influencers to drive the conversation and eventually offer a dual pack at retailers. She planned for packaging to include a QR code to lead to a landing page where consumers could view Latina stories, resources and other content to persuade them to continue to use the product.

After her summer experience was complete, a friend told Hernandez she saw a beauty influencer showing a mother/ daughter dual pack of lipstick from L’Oreal.

“They might have implemented that and taken some kind of inspiration from what I’ve been able to do with the hair color team … it was really nice to be able to see that come to life in that way,” she said.

Besides the satisfaction of seeing some of her ideas executed in different ways, Hernandez said she left the internship with a number of other key takeaways. She was able to utilize new software programs, create weekly performance reports for upper management, and practice her networking skills – both with L’Oreal employees and the other roughly 200 interns who spent the summer with the corporation.

“It was very fast-paced, very intense at times, but it really taught me resilience and knowing exactly what you want out of your experience,” she said.

Hernandez was placed in the hands-on marketing internship at L’Oreal after being selected for the Advertising Educational Foundation’s (AEF) highly-competitive Marketing and Advertising Education (MADE) Internship Program. The program connects undergraduate students with paid summer internships at Fortune 500 companies, leading agencies, and major media organizations. Hernandez credits her Ramapo Marketing professor Patti Mandel with supporting her in the application process and helping her with her letter of recommendation.

The L’Oreal internship was one of many experiences Hernandez has had access to as a student in Ramapo’s Anisfield School of Business. She has served as vice president of the Women in Business club, marketing intern for Ramapo Dining Services, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Psi, the professional  business fraternity. On campus, Hernandez has also served as president of the Association of Latinos Moving Ahead (ALMA) and has worked for Commuter Affairs, spearheading and advertising events through social media.