From perfectly matched make-up to personalised perfume, here’s how artificial intelligence is beginning to influence our beauty buys
WORDS: LAURA MULLEY PHOTOS: GETTY
Artificial intelligence (AI) is – or will soon be – impacting every area of our lives, from driving our cars and tailoring our shopping to monitoring our social media scrolling. Depending on your views, it’s either coming to take your job or going to make your life a whole lot easier.
And this AI revolution has hit the beauty industry, too. Whether it’s whipping up bespoke formulas or generating trends by computer, technology is being used to influence how we choose our beauty products and treatments.
1 MADE-TO-MEASURE MAKE-UP
Picking the perfect foundation can be a bit of a stab in the dark, especially when shopping online, with seemingly endless shades, undertones and finishes to choose from and often no option to return the product if you get it wrong.
Hoping to remove this confusion is Dcypher, the world’s first AI-powered make-up brand that uses a precise face-scanning tool to analyse the exact tones in your skin. Customers then select their finish and coverage, and a bottle of bespoke foundation that matches your skin perfectly is whipped up. Dcypher’s My Custom Foundation costs £42, and there’s also a £32 concealer.
And if you’ve always struggled to find the right shade of lipstick, YSL’s clever Rouge Sur Mesure Device might be the answer. This nifty gadget lets you select from 1,000 shades via an app and virtually try it on before it whips up a single measure of creamy lipstick. The smart technology can also match a real-life colour (for example, a dress or a nail polish), and even generate a shade that will complement your skin tone, hair colour and outfit. The downside is that, at £260 for the device plus £90 for a set of cartridges, you might need the bank balance of a tech entrepreneur to afford it.
2 TREND FORECASTING
It’s been a little over a year since online chatbot ChatGPT launched, and since then the innovative AI programme has shown that it can hold a decent conversation, generate essays and write songs – and even predict what we’ll be asking for at the hair salon this year.
Ask ChatGPT for 2024’s hair trends predictions and the answers it cheerily responds with sound remarkably accurate. Suggestions include “short haircuts”, “retro styles” and “accessories”, which – judging by the popularity of bobs, 90s-style ‘dos and ribbon
