Salon-worthy manicures at home and expert skin care advice from artificial intelligence: the beauty industry is counting on tech to get consumers pampered like the rich and famous.
The Nimble manicure salon calls itself the world’s first device to combine AI and complex robotics to paint nails flawlessly — without the hassle of making an appointment.
Resembling a heavyset printer, Nimble can varnish all ten fingernails and dry them in just 25 minutes.
Photo: AFP
The device, an eight-kilo white box with a special door for the hand, is on display this week at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the tech industry’s annual hub.
According to its creators, the device uses high-resolution micro-cameras and 3-D imaging to determine nail shape, size and curvature. Then a small robotic arm, guided by AI algorithms, applies the requisite three coats, with a blow dry after each applied layer.
When it goes on sale in March, more than 30 colors will be available in capsules costing US$10 each. The unit costs US$599.
Photo: AFP
In a study published in May, consulting firm McKinsey put the global beauty industry — which includes skin and hair care, perfume and make-up — at US$430 billion in 2022 and forecast it to reach US$580 billion by 2027. The industry’s Internet sales almost quadrupled between 2015 and 2022.
AI, a term often deployed as the latest catchphrase for anything tech, has also infiltrated beauty products such as make-up and skincare, including from industry giants.
The free Beauty Genius app, presented by L’Oreal, is intended to be an AI-supported “virtual personal advisor.”
Photo: AFP
It recommends skincare and make-up products according to skin type, gives tips on techniques and answers questions about problems such as acne and hair loss. Users can also try out the products virtually, guiding customers who are overwhelmed by a physical shop’s rows of foundations with similar shades and varied textures, or creams with seemingly endless specificities.
This is also the aim of the program Beautiful AI, created by Perfect Corp, which combines generative AI and virtual reality to perform live skin analyses, 3-D hairstyle or jewelry trials and make recommendations.
Korea’s Prinker, a specialist in ephemeral, customizable tattoos for skin and hair, is unveiling a similar product that will apply make-up this year. The device will also put AI to work with a biometric 3-D scanner to map facial features and then recommend the right contours, “printing” the corresponding powders to the face.
INFRARED HAIR BLOWER
Companies are also bringing beauty personalization tech to hair care. This week, L’Oreal presents the world premiere of a connected hairdryer that can be customized via an app, taking hair type into account and automatically adapting power and heat distribution. The Airlight Pro uses infrared light to dry the hair, allowing it to preserve the hair’s moisture, said Adrien Chretien, head of augmented beauty development at L’Oreal.
Due to go on sale in April, it also offers energy savings of 31 percent compared with a conventional appliance, he added. Another product scheduled for launch later this year is Colorsonic, a brush-like hair coloring device that uses cartridges and that L’Oreal says has been in development for nine years.
The only geopolitical certainty is that massive change is coming. Three macro trends are only just starting to accelerate, forming a very disruptive background to an already unsettled future. One is that technological transformations exponentially more consequential and rapid than anything prior are in their infancy, and will play out like several simultaneous industrial revolutions. ROBOT REVOLUTION It is still early days, but impacts are starting to be felt. Just yesterday, this line appeared in an article: “To meet demands at Foxconn, factory planners are building physical AI-powered robotic factories with Omniverse and NVIDIA AI.” In other words, they used AI
Last month historian Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an opinion piece in the New York Times with suggestions for an “America First” foreign policy for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Of course China and Taiwan received a mention. “Under presidents Trump and Biden,” Wertheim contends, “the world’s top two powers have descended into open rivalry, with tensions over Taiwan coming to the fore.” After complaining that Washington is militarizing the Taiwan issue, he argues that “In truth, Beijing has long proved willing to tolerate the island’s self-rule so long as Taiwan does not declare independence
Big changes are afoot in global politics, which that are having a big impact on the global order, look set to continue and have the potential to completely reshape it. In my previous column we examined the three macro megatrends impacting the entire planet: Technology, demographics and climate. Below are international trends that are social, political, geopolitical and economic. While there will be some impact on Taiwan from all four, it is likely the first two will be minor, but the second two will likely change the course of Taiwan’s history. The re-election of Donald Trump as president of the US
Nov. 25 to Dec. 1 The Dutch had a choice: join the indigenous Siraya of Sinkan Village (in today’s Tainan) on a headhunting mission or risk losing them as believers. Missionaries George Candidus and Robert Junius relayed their request to the Dutch governor, emphasizing that if they aided the Sinkan, the news would spread and more local inhabitants would be willing to embrace Christianity. Led by Nicolaes Couckebacker, chief factor of the trading post in Formosa, the party set out in December 1630 south toward the Makatao village of Tampsui (by today’s Gaoping River in Pingtung County), whose warriors had taken the
RSS