Aveda taps AI for virtual hair color sampling

Brief:

Hair care brand Aveda is letting customers virtually try on hair coloring before booking a salon appointment. The "Find Your Shade" section of its website, which is accessible on mobile and desktop devices, uses augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from Perfect Corp. to overlay digital coloring on customer's real hair, per an announcement.
The try-on experience features 64 hair colors, including Aveda's newest line of bright Vivids, and a "color melt" effect for another 30 shades. Perfect's YouCam technologies adjust to a person's natural hair color and lighting conditions to provide a more accurate virtual color effect.
The AR experience aims to boost the confidence of salon-goers before they book an appointment. Aveda's products are available in Aveda Experience Centers and more than 9,000 professional hair salons and spas worldwide and at aveda.com, per the announcement.

Insight:

With its AR hair coloring try-on, Aveda can more effectively demonstrate its products and increase the likelihood that consumers are satisfied with their visit to a salon. Because the experience is web-based, mobile users don't need to download a separate app like Perfect's YouCam Makeup that has AR try-ons to share online, and lets people shop from a handful of major cosmetics brands.

Aveda, which Estée Lauder bought in 1997, is among the brands that have added AR try-ons to their mobile marketing efforts. While Aveda aims to drive visits to salons, other brands have used the technology to spur direct-to-consumer (DTC) orders or retail sales. DTC brand Madison Reed worked with Perfect to demonstrate its at-home hair coloring products on its website. Meanwhile, Color&Co, L'Oréal's brand for at-home hair coloring, added similar AR technology from Modiface, a rival to Perfect, to its website in September.

Aveda's AR sampling tool is another sign that Perfect has expanded the applications for its technology beyond its YouCam apps in recent years. The company in July introduced its "YouCam for Web" technology to broaden its usage among a wider variety of businesses, including small- and medium-sized enterprises, that could more easily incorporate AR try-ons to their websites. At that time, the company said more than 200 brands used its AR tech to showcase their products in a more immersive manner to strengthen users' purchasing confidence. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group in September integrated Perfect's YouCam technology into its Tmall and Taobao websites, signaling the global scale of this type of mobile technology.