Brief:
- Perfect Corp. added personalized cosmetics consulting to its YouCam Makeup app that puts people in touch with live beauty advisers. The "Beauty Advisor 1-on-1" experience lets app users in the U.S. call to connect with professional advisers and receive personalized tips and tutorials through YouCam's augmented reality (AR) makeup try-ons, according to a press release.
- YouCam hand-picked a team of professionals with retail beauty experience to help launch the interactive service. Once a user is connected by video chat from the app, beauty advisers can display looks and products virtually on themselves or on the face of the callers.
- In addition to providing insights, product recommendations and beauty tips, the advisers can help the user find and shop for products and add them directly to a virtual shopping cart for purchase. The free service is available seven days a week from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST, and can be found in the YouCam Makeup app in the App Store and Google Play.
Insight:
With so many companies looking to remove the human element from their operations in an effort to save money and offer more convenient, efficient services, YouCam is taking a different approach by leveraging both mobile capabilities with a personalized experience that maintains a human element.
Assuming that the service works well and isn't overwhelmed with consultation requests during open hours, this may mark a new stage for incorporating AR in video chats for product demonstrations. In addition, this feature lets the human beauty advisers cross-sell or up-sell complementary products to boost the average ticket size at checkout. Overall, the personalized experience will likely provide users a more convenient and valuable service than an automated or self-serve version.
Mobile AR has become a key technology for beauty brands within the past year, especially as younger adults and teens share their makeup looks and reviews on social media and search for inspiration or video tutorials on YouTube. As smartphones and AR tech grow increasingly sophisticated, retail brands will likely continue to experiment with immersive capabilities that help people along their shopping journey and drive purchases.
Perfect, which developed the YouCam apps for makeup and beauty companies, has worked with several major cosmetics brands to demonstrate their products with AR try-ons. Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Lancôme Paris and Maybelline New York are among the companies that have partnered with Perfect on its apps that help shoppers browse and sample products and entire looks while on the go before checking out in store. Most recently, Perfect partnered with Amway last month on a mobile app that lets shoppers virtually try on its Artistry line of products before buying.
