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- Major brands have been experimenting with AR for the past five years, allowing customers to select colors and create looks
From high-end to bargain brands, beauty’s big names embraced augmented reality (AR) to drive customer purchases.
Makeup purchases in the past entailed a leap of faith; how will a certain color really look on you? While high-end department stores or beauty salons touted cosmetics sections where customers could test out colors, moderately priced drugstores lacked the option to play around and test products.
The start of the beauty revolution
Around eight years ago, beauty brands started experimenting with virtual try-ons . L’Oréal was among the first brands to release the AR-powered feature with its Makeup Genius.
Launched in 2014, L’Oréal described Makeup Genius as a way to express yourself, risk-free:
With the help of our virtual makeover, you can test the biggest beauty trends with zero commitment. Want to see what bright blue eyeshadow would look like gracing your lids? How about an intense highlighter on your cheekbones? You can make it happen—and all you need is a webcam, a cell phone camera, or even a selfie (if you go the selfie route, scroll through your camera roll to find a #nofilter option).
It also released a video where a model selects a look and virtually tries it on. Less than two years later, it released another video about how customers could begin . purchasing directly from the app.
In 2018, L’Oréal continued to build up its AR offerings and purchased Modiface; a company that became “a global market leader in augmented reality and artificial intelligence for the Beauty industry.”
AR beauty goes mainstream
The technology allowing someone to see how a lipstick or liner would look on their face caught on, and many other brands followed suit. In one Futurism article, the author explains the trend as the customer’s new expectation for purchase and how virtual try-ons allow brands to“create a really sick, digital experience, at very low cost.”
Today, brands from premium brands like Gucci to the budget-friendly e.l.f. aspire to increase customers’ online purchasing confidence.
Accurately translating makeup color onto a face via an app on desktop requires specific technical skills. Leading AR and 3D creative platform, Poplar Studio’s CEO, David Ripert, told Futurism that it is much more challenging to apply flawless virtual makeup than to create the fun filters— popularized by Snapchat— that many brands utilize today..
As Ripert told Futurism, ”it’s not going to look as realistic as possible unless it completely matches your own form, and that requires a lot of development.’
There are also environmental factors that influence how particular colors look on someone, such as lighting or reflections. All of these nuances influence how the makeup will look in AR.
Despite the difficulties involved in perfecting the technology, brands aim to deliver personalized experiences for their customers, showcasing how to achieve particular looks. Even before 2020, what was a nice extra became essential.
From Pandemic to a View of the Future
The beauty brands that already set the foundation (no pun intended) for virtual try-ons were better able to connect with their customers during the pandemic than those who didn’t invest in AR. Of course with its six-year-long headstart, L’Oréal was well-positioned to engage and convert customers.
The brand reflected on their position in a blog post referencing the “events of the past year” and how they needed to “keep reinventing the Beauty experience to meet the needs of our consumers.”
Of course, other brands are now following the same path. Just last month, Coty announced its partnership with Perfect Corp, a beauty tech solution “that will embed a suite of best-in-class augmented reality and artificial intelligence experiences into the digital marketing toolkits of its beauty brands.”
That will allow the drugstore brands such as CoverGirl, Sally Hansen, and others to offer a virtual try-on experience. Coty also is planning to enrich in-store shopping with touchless product experiences at a time when hygiene and safety are dominating retailer operations and consumer mindsets.”
That line of reasoning likely would have resonated stronger last year, though perhap it took Coty 18 months or so to unveil its intention to apply technology in this way.
This trend is , all about effectively connecting with customers on their own terms. Enabling them to sample products on their smartphone makes sense at a time when most people use mobile devices for their shopping and research even when they visit a physical store.
Coty’s Chief Digital Officer Jean-Denis Mariani said the transition to virtual experiences will vastly improve the user experience: “This partnership adds a new dimension to Coty’s digital journey, incorporating some of the best augmented and virtual reality technologies that will help the full portfolio of our brands unlock the best digital user experience and, as a result, help advance social selling.”
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This is the wave of the future for beauty. Even as customers return to stores to try on products, they will likely cling to virtual experiences for its ease of accessibility, convenience, and safety. Brands that capitalize on that will be able to personalize recommendations to cross-sell, upsell, and generally increase the lifetime value of their customers.
For more on virtual experiences, see why brands are Realizing the Value of Zero-Party Data