The next time you discover a lip color you like, AI can help you quickly find a matching shade in Chanel’s lipstick range. The company today announced its new lip scanner app, which allows you to use your phone’s camera to identify a shade – whether it’s on someone else’s lips or just the color of your favorite wallet. Then a match from Chanel’s “Lip Universe” is proposed, which includes more than 400 products with different surfaces and shades.
This isn’t the first time a beauty company has created a lipstick color identification app. YSL’s Perso system even prints out the exact color you are scanning, making it more sophisticated. With Lipscanner you can also virtually “try on” the lipstick to see if you like it. To be clear, digital make-up try-on features aren’t new either – Sephora, Benefit, and many other big beauty and cosmetic brands have developed their own versions.
That doesn’t even include the numerous selfie editing apps like YouCam Makeup with embeds that users can use to try on and buy makeup. However, Chanel said its algorithm “saves users the task of searching through large ion line inventories by making color detection and matching seamless”. I’m not sure that this claim is true, given the examples I’ve already cited, but Chanel is one of the biggest brands in the world and has a huge following who will likely appreciate the exact product number for something finding what they wanted after seeing it on Instagram.
Chanel
As the beauty and technology industries continue to work together and overlap, personalized skin care and cosmetic products become more common. This is good news for people with specific needs and should hopefully encourage more inclusion and diversity, although businesses need to be careful not to alienate customers by making their customizable products too expensive.