6 CES Tech Trends for Fashion and Beauty
The tech supershow is becoming a must-attend for fashion, beauty and retail. Here are the key themes for these sectors.
Innovation was all the rage among the fashion, beauty and retail ranks at CES as companies from The North Face, Kate Spade New York and Fossil to L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Ulta Beauty, and more flocked to Las Vegas for the technology supershow.
The event, which ended Friday and drew 4,500 exhibiting companies and more than 180,000 attendees from more than 155 countries, was a lightning rod for brands eager to strut their innovative stuff alongside the likes of Google, Samsung and Qualcomm, while getting a front-row look at tech's major moves.
The effect casts CES as an essential destination, rising to the level of shows like MAGIC and the National Retail Federation's annual conference.
“Beauty tech has become something of a major interest,” said Guive Balooch, global vice president of L'Oréal's Technology Incubator. “I've been lucky to be part of a company that, six years ago, thought about [tech], because there's so many things you learn.…But it's not like a fun trend anymore. It's a real value and we all need to now be in it. I think everyone needs to be here.”
The ones who attend come with a savvy that seems to see through the exhibition's flash of blaring lights, roller coasters and roll-up TVs. Perhaps it's because fashion and beauty know glamor better than anyone, so they are less impressed. Or maybe it's because brands and stores on the front lines of consumer retail seek real solutions, not gimmicks.
In a beauty tech session at the High Tech Retailing summit, Perfect Corp.'s Adam Gam described the challenge with augmented reality: “We like to say that all AR is immersive. But there's good AR and bad AR. If it's bad, they'll never use it again.”
It's a good time for this sort of perspective. The 2019 show featured technologies that have been maturing for years — including artificial intelligence, 5G cellular connectivity, augmented and virtual reality, digital health, entertainment innovation, connected and autonomous vehicles, resilience technologies and smart homes and cities.
Such emerging techs may not be fully baked yet, but they're reaching new levels of sophistication. Some are even positioned to become bedrock technologies that buoy other categories. And when that happens, they can swing entire industries.
As one executive told WWD, “So many technologies are growing up. It's good stuff, if you're invested there. But more importantly, put them together, and now you can really do some things.”
Here are a few of the major themes from CES that are poised to shape commerce, apparel, beauty and more. hardware and robust platforms signal how deeply AI will be embedded in the future's tech foundation.
For instance, Intel revealed that it's working with Facebook to bring an AI processor later this year that offers more compute power. That will help with things like image-processing and identifying people in photos.
AI chips are a crowded space, with entries coming from Nvidia, which focuses on gaming, and Amazon Web Services, the e- commerce giant's cloud business for companies.
The Google Assistant AI platform wants to create an ecosystem around the search giant's voice and AI efforts. Its marquee aspect, the Google Assistant Connect platform, offers tools so third-party device makers can easily add support for Google's voice tech to their products. Amazon started offering software tools for Alexa skills last year.
Talkative gadgets are arriving en masse, and the systems powering them are improving because of natural language processing. Some can automatically adapt to different conditions, without user intervention, and even customize features based on what they learn about the user's preferences.
The fashion, beauty and retail sectors understand the need for personalization, powered by AI. It appears that those powers are set to grow exponentially. As tech advances, so do related trends like facial recognition and voice assistants, which rely on AI, computer vision, machine-learning and natural language processing.
A recurring theme at CES, facial recognition has long been available in smartphones through features like Face ID. Now the technology is showing up in places like homes, cars and stores.
Companies including Procter & Gamble, Softbank Robotics and Perfect Corp., among others, demonstrated technologies that can identify customers, connect to their data and offer recommendations.
SoftBank Robotics chief strategy officer Steve Carlin offered a look at how Pepper the robot could improve the shopping experience in physical retail.
If customers buy something online and head to the store, Pepper can greet them, identify them, let them know the order is ready, suggest other products they might like and — through a partnership with
Simbe and its Tally aisle-tracking robotic system — let them know if the product is on the shelf or not in real time.
For Carlin, the experience is also about offering retailers contextually relevant data. “[The system] pulls from store inventory, loyalty and e-commerce,” he said. “You can see the difference between in-store shopper and online shopper. Or how shoppers may act differently between the web site and the store.”
Beauty is a natural destination for facial and product recognition. Perfect Corp.'s tech can identify the makeup worn by a subject in photos, and also analyze skin and determine its condition, as well as the user's age, gender and mood.
Procter & Gamble's SK-II exhibit showcased a similar concept, but in a futuristic retail environment. The Japanese brand envisions a store equipped with a slew of cameras that can recognize the shopper and offer personalized regimens. With sensor-equipped product packaging, the system can also prompt customers to stick with scheduled skin-care routines.
The evolution of these systems and machines is exciting, intriguing…and, for some, unsettling. In various sessions, questions about privacy inevitably came up from audience members. As facial recognition powers grow, so will the public's nervousness and fear around them.
Perfect Corp.'s YouCam apps featured skin analysis, but it's not the only one. A growing subsection of the beauty sector is seeing a concerted push from start-ups and giants.
Following up its Neutrogena SkinScanner and Skin360 app introduction at CES
2018, Johnson & Johnson took to this year's conference with a new tech tool: Neutrogena's MaskID, a micro-3-D-printed sheet mask. It can precision-map the user's face and load up a customized mix of ingredients to address specific issues.
After unveiling its UV Sense wearable at CES 2018, L'Oréal returned to showcase its latest My Skin Track pH.
“There's 50 years of work done around where pH of skin is so well correlated to skin condition, but nobody ever did anything outside of an academic environment,” said L'Oréal's Balooch. “Because to measure pH, you have to have enough sweat to do this litmus test, which requires people to get on a treadmill. And no dermatologist today has the time to put people on a treadmill.”
For a tech sector that has been focused on digital health, CES 2019 seems like an apt venue to expound on health's direct connection to beauty.
“My vision on health is that it will inspire the future of beauty, and beauty will inspire, potentially, the future of health,” he added. “Wellness and lifestyle are becoming a big part of the future of beauty, and especially in skin…it's very much related to, not just your cosmetics, but your lifestyle.”
For its very first CES, Procter &
Gamble came armed with a parade of demos. The Opté wand can scan the surface of the skin and apply exactly the amount of serum or makeup to cover spots, freckles or other issues.
“Opté is our first-ever precision skincare device that allows you to reveal the natural beauty of your skin,” a company spokeswoman told WWD. She went on to say that Opté combines optic technology, proprietary algorithms and printing technology with P&G skin care to scan, detect and correct hyperpigmentation.
It's akin to a real-life version of Photoshopping away spots. It works without leaving the caked-in feeling that comes from overapplying elixirs and foundations. The technology takes cues from inkjet printers: Opté uses 120 nozzles to deposit a precise amount of makeup, at one-billionth of a liter.
“What this does is, it takes 200 pictures per second — so on an average basis, about 24,000 pictures,” she continued. “It then takes all of the data, of understanding the color differences between the one little ►