Up Close & Personal
The rapidly expanding world of customisable skincare offers the tantalising possibility of letting artificial intelligence and biotechnology get to know your skin better than you ever could.
IT’S A TRICKY business, skincare. Investing in a new face cream or serum, no matter its promises or the rarity of its premium ingredients, is always a gamble. There’s no telling how your skin will react (at worst, explosively) – so really, it’s just a guessing game. Making an informed decision has never been more relevant, and it seems odd that many of us are content to stock our grooming cabinets with the pret-a-porter, off-the-peg equivalents of skincare products.
We might agonise over the bespoke paint colour of a Rolls-Royce or don a shoe deftly shaped around a unique last, but what goes on our faces remains a well-intentioned and yet clumsy patchwork of tried-andtested products.
Stepping into the gleaming domain of customisable skincare, however, can shake some sense of coherence into your beauty regimen, fine-tune the products you’re using and restore peace to your skin.
Perhaps the most important question is how hands-on you want to be with your skincare routine. For those who enjoy playing alchemist, you can have a selection of products that you DIY – or rather, BIY (blend-ityourself) – to your own specifications, depending on your skin’s requirements at that precise time.
It’s a concept that’s worked well for brands such as Loli Beauty (www.lolibeauty.com) and Emulsion (www.emulsion.co.uk), both of which offer a range of multitasking bases – cleansers, serums, masks and creams – into which ‘mix-ins’ or ‘add-ons’ can be incorporated.
One of the most appealing hallmarks of customisable skincare is that you have a regimen that you’re fully in control of. You know what a product or ingredient does and can adjust the concentration or substitute it with another, should your skin protest. Short of visiting your dermatologist on a daily basis, who knows your skin better than you? Well, therein lies another theory:
Short of visiting your dermatologist on a daily basis, who knows your skin better than you?
that new technological developments and artificial intelligence (AI) can do exactly that.
Just last year, celebrity aesthetician Georgia Louise (www.georgialouise. com) unveiled her Bespoke Cream Machine, which – after measuring a client’s hydration, sebum and pH levels – whips together a hyper-customised moisturiser within eight minutes. The machine holds a total of 17 ingredients from which 50 million cream combinations can, apparently, be derived, making it a breeze to cater to even the most sensitive or challenging skin conditions.
The catch is that the relevant data points can only be collected on Louise’s wondrous machine in her eponymous atelier on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But since we won’t be visiting New York anytime soon, there are solutions aplenty online.
Such are the far-reaching powers of the Internet that a number of personalised skincare brands now tailor-make products and regimens for their customers based on answers they submit, following an extensive questionnaire – or even a make-upfree selfie.
These skin assessments may appear simple on the surface, but the algorithms behind them – like the one powering French bespoke beauty box service Seasonly (www.seasonly. fr) – must take into account complex factors such as each customer’s age, sleeping patterns and exposure to local pollution levels.
Then there’s Atolla (atolla. co), whose algorithms create a personalised serum for each
“I think the future of skincare is both personalised and preventative.”
subscriber on a monthly basis. Based on insights sourced from their efficacy database (compiled from people with similar skin types) and a regular, comprehensive analysis through a skin health kit, the brand tracks subscribers’ skin conditions and adapts their serum formulation to accommodate all manner of changes.
“Our company was built around the idea that we can apply the scientific method to skincare and use data to create the most efficacious formulations,” explains Meghan Maupin, co-founder and CEO of Atolla. “I think the future of skincare is both personalised and preventative. Not only can AI help connect people to the most effective formulations, but it can also predict what their skin will need, helping to prevent skin issues before they occur.”
Another wave-maker on the personalised beauty scene, Proven (www.provenskincare.com)
– co-founded by entrepreneur Ming Zhao and computational physicist Dr Amy Yuan – taps into
The Skin Genome Project, which posits itself as the world’s largest skincare database.
With the capacity to rapidly analyse a dizzying array of information – stretching from the effectiveness of over 20,238 skincare ingredients right down to the water hardness, humidity level and UV index in a customer’s living environment
– it’s a veritable marvel of AI. (The project won the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s 2018 Artificial Intelligence Award.)
A three-minute Skin Genome Quiz feeds answers into the database, selecting the best, most potent ingredients for a customer’s skin, and results in the creation of three custom products: a cleanser, day moisturiser and night cream.
Should you wish to eschew a monogamous commitment to a single customised beauty brand, Skintelli’s (www.skintelli.com) next-level skincare personalisation kit uses epigenetic testing to provide a ‘dynamic snapshot’ of your skin in its current state, rather than what you were born with.
A painless, two-minute adhesive process to selfcollect DNA from your skin uncovers fascinating details, such as how quickly your skin refreshes its cells, the effects of oxidation and the age of your skin versus your chronological age. From there, Skintelli matches your results against a database of existing products from thousands of brands, coming up with a list of 36 recommendations that best suit your skin – effectively removing the trial-and-error process from the equation of building your regimen.
Nowhere is the role of epigenetics more important, according to William Lee, co-founder and CEO of EpigenCare – the company behind Skintelli – than in the realm of anti-ageing products.
“Skincare products may contain ingredients that make your skin look superficially good,” he says,
“but do absolutely nothing for you in the long term or help what’s going on underneath your skin. If we want to have skin appear naturally beautiful and to combat ageing, then we need to look at epigenetic mechanisms that inherently regulate the aesthetic appearance of the skin, rather than simply slapping a temporary coat of ‘paint’ on.
“Epigenetic mechanisms are dynamic, changeable by the environment and skincare ingredients, and directly affect gene activity and the capacity to produce essential proteins for your skin like collagen and elastin.”
The time, it seems, has come for us to become a little more self-obsessed about our skincare – albeit in the right way, where a product that well and truly works on our skin is a deliverable expectation, not a vague goal.
So send for that skin testing kit, feed the databases and put those algorithms to work, for the future of the personalised beauty industry looks bright – and so too, hopefully, will our skin.