Finding Beauty in All the Right Spaces
Me and my girlfriend have a pretty happy relationship. We agree on (most) things, enjoy each other’s company immensely, and she gets to be my guinea pig for whatever culinary concoction I’ve developed in my head. But she does despise one thing about me: I have resilient skin. No, I’m not talking about that in the way that some of our leaders have skin thinner than the oxygen in outer space. Rather, my skin is not as prone to breaking out, despite the circumstances. As someone who grew up a natural sweat-er, combined with a love for being over hot stoves, it surprised me too how well my skin reacted to most things that my girlfriend would freak out and stray away from.
Now, I’m not one for the idea of toning my face. I take good care of it, as good a care as my dermatologist’s prescriptions will allow. But, I took a look into the Elf Cosmetics app to gather some outside perspective on what value it has to people whose skin may not be as fortunate as my own. Consider this blog my Yelp review.
I normally hate shopping online because of one key factor: not being able to try on anything. Normally, it’s hard to even take customer reviews valuably when even I’m not sure of what I’m looking for. Sometimes, window shopping is a fun time, and I’ll be more pressed to buy something that I found organically. Elf Cosmetics takes this all into consideration.
My favorite feature on this app is the virtual-try on tab, something I don’t normally come across in any of my shopping experiences for clothing. You have the option of trying a variety of their products through the lens of your front camera, or if your face has the elegance of tree bark like myself, you’ll probably use the model feature instead, which gives the user a canvas on which to display their potential interests on.
All of the utilizations of the app lie on 5 main tabs on the bottom of the interface: The Home Page, a Virtual-Try On room, a place to scan receipts on behalf of Elf’s point-based rewards system, a loyalty page sign-in, and finally, your shopping bag. This app is interactive to all visitors of the page, from people who say “just browsing” more than “Hello”, to those with an already concrete purchase in mind.
I don’t think there was a moment in my whole experience browsing this app where I ever felt lost or out of place. Even as someone who has minimal to no experience with beauty brands, I feel like I could make a very well informed purchase through the Elf Cosmetics app with no prior intentions. (my girlfriend is probably frothing at the mouth at this.)
I think the only slip up I found came from the Virtual-Try On room. Because many of Elf’s products have a variety of shades (eye shadow, contour, powder), I was under the impression that you could see every one of them in the room, but it seemed that only one color would attach itself to my/the model’s face. Now, I’m normally good to go by color association if this were to happen to me with clothes (I’d just look for a certain design and then envision the shade of color on it), but I imagine for beauty products that these rooms should be held to a higher standard in allowing for more freedom in trying on their products virtually. This holds especially for people who are very particular about how their skin looks. Such a feature is definitely necessary in these times, where in-person interactions are so limited, making augmented reality experiences like these all the more valuable.
Overall, Elf provides a balanced and relatively seamless experience for its users. Their products are listed by type on the Home tab, and it is that tab system that helps rid the app of any potential overlapping clusters that would otherwise confuse a visiting guest.
In the culinary world, there’s a term called mise en place, or “everything in its place”, and if this app were a restaurant, it’d probably get a Michelin star on organization alone. If you’re looking for all the beauty without any of the confusion, go check out Elf. It’s worth a shot.
