The personal touch

The next generation of personalised beauty products

Envision a world where your face cream is tailormade for your DNA, your hair mask knows you got highlights last Thursday, and your serum has a better handle on your likes and your dislikes than your partner. Innovators from the worlds of tech and beauty are dreaming up these super personalised beauty products right now. If half of the predictions pan out, the next generation of lipsticks and hydrators will be virtually unrecognisable.

In the next year… … Sheet masks will go high-tech

Yes, they make skin dewy fast, but if you buy one that’s not the best fit for your face, they can also cause serum to leak into your eyes and get uncomfortably close to your mouth. A first-world problem, but annoying enough that Neutrogena created 3D-printed sheet masks, called Neutrogena MaskiD, that are tailored to your face shape.

“The same facialrecognition technology that lets you open your iPhone by looking at your screen also allows us to scan and create a 3D model of your face in our app,” says Michael Southall, global research and development lead for beauty tech and devices at Johnson & Johnson. To print the customised sheet masks, he and his team partnered with experts who specialise in 3D-printing artificial joints. Maybe even more exciting? The ingredients are also customised. “We can put different ingredients on different facial zones – forehead, cheeks, around the eyes,” says Michael. Neutrogena already has an iPhone attachment, the Skin360 Skin Scanner Lens, that uses sensors to measure moisture levels on various parts of the face and imaging technology to track wrinkle depth and pore size. Based on these readings, the new MaskiD app will recommend ingredient combinations for different facial zones (five ingredients, including hyaluronic acid and vitamin C, will be available at launch). “The possibilities are almost infinite,” says Michael.

… Flawless foundation will be just a blue LED de vice away

The Opté Precision Skin System looks like an old-school handheld inventory scanner, but it’s one of the most impressive things you’ll see. Instead of reading bar codes, the device scans your face with blue light to identify age spots and pimples, uses a facial-recognition algorithm to determine each blemish’s size, shape and colour, and then prints the perfect amount of foundation over them. It is essentially a 3D-makeup printer: it’s got a mini inkjet that squirts out droplets of foundation (each one finer than a strand of hair) to cover spots until they’re hidden.

“It’s difficult to print makeup onto the face with any real accuracy,” says Phill Dickens, a professor of manufacturing technology. Printing foundation, which can blend into surrounding skin, makes much more sense than printing something that’s got to be precise, like eyeliner, onto your face. The foundation (which Opté calls a Tone Perfecting Serum) is infused with skin-brightening, anti-inflammatory niacinamide to fade sun spots and pimples over time and comes in three sheer shades (fair, medium and deep). “You’ll get products for your skin’s unique needs”

In the next few years… … DNA testing could be a st andard step in buying skinc are Just as a saliva sample can trace your ancestry, it could also be used to predict how your skin will age based on an evaluation of your genetics. As we get older or are exposed to the sun, for example, certain genes flip on – “they trigger

enzymes that break down collagen, causing wrinkles and sagging. But if you realise that’s happening on a molecular level, you could use prescription ingredients to quiet your overactive genes and normalise your skin,” says cosmetic chemist Ni’Kita Wilson. And she’s not talking about the skincare ingredients we already know and love. “I’m talking about pharmaceutical companies developing new topical drugs to upregulate and downgrade overactive or underactive genes in your skin,” she adds. And just like that, the key to truly smooth skin could be written in your DNA.

… Sunscreens are poised to get smarter

“We have the technology to activate ingredients with temperature and light, so it’s an obvious and hopefully inevitable next step to have sunscreens that are more protective in UV-intense situations,” says dermo Dr Ellen Marmur. In her dream world, this will fix a major issue with sunscreen compliance. “Very often people forget to reapply, so it would be lifesaving to have ingredients that activate after an hour or as needed to virtually reapply.”

In the next five years…

… Your skincare will hav e to prove it’s working

Instant glow! Plumper skin! Before we get to 2030, such claims will be easily fact-checked. Ni’Kita predicts stores will have the same skin-analysis machines currently found only in doctors’ offices and labs. “There’s so much you can’t see with the naked eye. These machines will measure oil and hydration levels, track wrinkle depth and show pigment that’s waiting, in deep layers of the skin, to become sun spots,” she says. Based on all of these measurements, you’ll get targeted product recommendations (across brands) for your skin’s unique needs, down to different products for specific areas of your face. You’ll use your new routine for a few weeks and go back to get a new reading to see whether your new regimen is working. “It will take away the placebo effect and subjectivity that’s wrapped up with skincare, and the misconception that the same formulas deliver for everyone,” says Ni’Kita. “The one that’s great for my skin could do absolutely nothing for you.” And until these professional-grade machines become widely available, brands like Unilever’s new Skinsei will recommend products based onresultsofself-assessment surveys you fill out online.

In a more distant future… … You’ll lower your carbon footprint and get a trendy shadow on demand

“Imagine if instead of going to a makeup counter to buy a palette, you could print your own at home,” says makeup artist Robin Black, who expects we’ll be printing our own lip glosses and highlighters in 10 years – or even less. “It’s certainly possible,” says Phill. “Athome printing is so sophisticated now, I could foresee having personal 3D makeup printers.”

Creating customised liquid formulas is easy enough, but anything thicker would require patience. “Materials more viscous than milk can’t go through printers, so you’d need to mix them with a solvent,” says Phill. “Then you’d have to leave the makeup perfectly still and wait hours for that solvent to evaporate.” But the payoff might be worth it. You pick the colour, texture and finish you want, and just like that, personalised makeup. “It’ll really eliminate waste by cutting out shipping and packaging, and you could have gorgeous old-school makeup cases that you refill instead of throwing plastic compacts away,” says Robin. You could peruse a makeup-trend story and print the orangered lipstick you loved in seconds. Or you could design your own palette and actually be excited to wear every single shade inside. “You see so many highlighter palettes that have silver, rose-gold and gold shades in them – it would be rare to find one complexion that works with all of those colours. And I’m always looking for a specific shade of ’60s matte pastel blue; I would love to print it myself,” Robin says. “This is my fantasy of the future of makeup.”