Getting flawless skin analysis through Japan-made “viewty” app: Unbiased AI recommendations backed by human expertise
In December 2019, the Japanese beauty tech startup Novera officially released its cosmetics-recommending app Viewty, powered by skin analyzing AI.
Novera’s goal is to build a skin analyzing AI infrastructure that anyone can use whenever and wherever they need to. For users, they offer a shopping experience personalized to them individually. For brands and other companies, they offer a way of capturing smaller-sized mass markets.
Two days after Viewty’s release, it had already been used to perform around 10,000 skin measurements, and the app was downloaded 10,000 times within a week. Even now in April 2020, 60% of its daily active users are using it to analyze their skin at least once a day.
Skin analyzing in retail stores normally takes time and effort, for instance, the customer needs to remove their makeup. Customers also face the mental hurdle of feeling pressured to make a purchase. Novera CEO Kunitaka Endo says he thinks the secret to Viewty’s popularity is down to the fact that “users can measure their skin more frequently due to how easy Viewty allows you to do it with a smartphone in your home. Your skin also changes every day, so there’s the merit of fixed-point observation.”
When you take a photo of your skin with Viewty, the AI instantaneously analyzes and evaluates eight different aspects of your skin’s condition: wrinkles, texture, blotches, translucency, moistness, pores, skin quality, and skin age. As well as this data, it combines information on cosmetics that you use and the data of other users with similar skin conditions to recommend the ideal cosmetics for you as an individual. The AI is also notable for its unbiased approach in cross-referencing a diverse range of brands to select the most appropriate products.
However, “Viewty’s greatest competitive asset”, Endo reveals, “is how it incorporates the expertise of over 200 beauty advisors, which includes currently active beauticians, for establishing its standards in skin analysis. In other words, we’ve made a skin analyzing service for smartphones that has the reliability you previously only got when buying cosmetics over the counter.” Most skin analyzing AI used by other companies, including overseas companies, are based on the expertise of doctors and academics, but Viewty is based on the perspective of beauticians, who have a better knowledge of users, such as what beauty products and makeup they use regularly. Viewty offers skin analyzing AI for the purpose of everyday use.
Viewty brings smaller mass markets into perspective
Along with incorporating perspectives from the frontline of the beauty retail industry, Novera’s AI is also particularly useful for brands and other companies as it’s “set up so that more data can be collected and updated by having users continuously use it.”
A considerable number of cosmetics companies in Japan fail to make effective use of their own data for reasons such as not having the expertise or systems for making the best use of it. Their understanding of AI is also lagging and they’re unable to properly collect and use data, having not understood the appropriate data formats for machine learning.
“For example, even if they use POS data, their communication with customers will be limited, as they’ll only be able to recommend what was bought last month in the following month. So I think personalization and recommendations that use AI skin analysis will become extremely effective tools. It’s also possible to include this AI in brands’ online stores and customize the recommendations. Together the AI and all the data collected can reveal small mass markets that have the same consumer issues, such as sensitive skin or dry skin,” Endo suggests.
Viewty is also collecting data related to eating and exercising. With this, aspects that can depend on the individual, such as a correlation between greasy foods and getting rough skin, can be found. Endo believes that by increasing these ways of combining data, the measuring of things numerically that the whole industry so far has just been ‘feeling’ will become possible little by little, as will the visualization of small mass markets that companies and brands may want to approach.
Endo also says that instead of thinking in terms of trying to either increase downloads or develop solutions for other businesses, it’s more ideal rather to create the situation where “people realize, at some point or somewhere, that they’ve come into contact with Viewty’s skin analyzing AI.”
For users though, the best aspect is being able to get updated recommendations of the products that suit them the most, thanks to skin data being collected and stored together from wherever it might be measured: an app, department store, or a brand’s online store. It’s for this reason, Endo reveals that they plan to introduce the “viewty ID” where users’ personal data can be linked up from anywhere. Endo also mentioned his aspirations for the future: “The most important thing of all is for the habit of skin measurement to take root across a wide spectrum. I want to build an ecosystem where users and business clients can mutually maximize the benefits.”
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Jonggi HA
