Samsung taps Revieve for selfie skin analysis

Brief:

Finnish beauty-tech company Revieve partnered with Samsung to offer skin analysis in Bixby Vision, Samsung's artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that helps mobile users identify objects with a smartphone camera. Users of the Galaxy S10, Samsung's flagship smartphone, can take a selfie to receive Revieve's personalized skin analysis, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
Revieve and Samsung plan to add customized skincare product recommendations from retailers in the coming months, giving brands a chance to market their products to mobile users. The selfie skin analysis is first available to consumers in the United States and South Korea.
Revieve's suite of Digital Beauty Advisor products works among digital channels where retailers and brands interact with beauty shoppers, including digital in-store, e-commerce, Facebook Messenger and WeChat, per the announcement.

Insight:

Revieve's collaboration with Samsung means that beauty brands will have another opportunity to reach mobile shoppers who are seeking more personalized advice on skincare. It's also a chance for Samsung to expand the features of Bixby, its virtual assistant that has struggled to gain traction as tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Google lead the way in integrating AI into smartphones and connected-home devices.

The news underscores the growing importance of mobile tech to the beauty sector. At this week's SXSW conference, there is more exhibit space dedicated to beauty brands seeking to reach the 47% of the exhibition's 70,000 attendees who are women, per Glossy. Augmented reality (AR) beauty developer Perfect introduced a virtual on-demand beauty adviser experience for its YouCam Makeup app, while MySkin unveiled OKU, a skin scanning device, mobile app and community platform to help consumers evaluate their skin, among other launches.

Several skincare brands have integrated mobile technology with their product recommendations in the past year. Olay unveiled several new Skin Advisor features at the recent Consumer Electronics show, including the Future You Simulation, which uses an algorithm to age up photos of users to predict what their skin may look like over the years. L'Oréal this year introduced a test version of My Skin Track pH, a wearable device that helps people track the acid levels of their skin as part of their skincare regimen, which followed its wearable UV sensor called My Skin Track UV that's compatible with Apple's smartphones and tablets.

Neutrogena, the beauty brand owned by Johnson & Johnson, in January demonstrated a mobile app that uses the iPhone's 3D camera to scan a user's face, letting the company create personalized face masks that will be shipped directly to customers. The MaskiD technology comes a year after Neutrogena debuted its Skin360 accessory for the iPhone at CES 2018.