Slate Cosmetics Lets Consumers Upload A Photo, Sample Digital Makeup

Slate Cos­met­ics has cre­at­ed an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence. After upload­ing an image, shop­pers can see how prod­ucts will look on their own face.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Today, brands have every oppor­tu­ni­ty to launch inno­v­a­tive cam­paigns that uti­lize the best of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy to enhance user expe­ri­ences. 2014 has seen the roll­out of iBea­con tech­nol­o­gy to tie togeth­er online/offline pur­chase jour­neys, and the launch of new con­cept stores from the likes of Argos, and Thomas Cook have giv­en us a glimpse of the role retail shop­ping can ful­fill when approached with a dig­i­tal mind­set.


Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion has also extend­ed to con­tent mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives that enhance the research and con­sid­er­a­tion stages of con­sumer pur­chase fun­nels.

Slate Cos­met­ics have launched a new mobile opti­mized site that allows users to sam­ple dif­fer­ent make­up and cos­met­ics prod­ucts on an uploaded pho­to of them­selves. The new site is pow­ered by Look­ing Glass, a tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped by Mod­i­face, that pro­vides an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty lay­er that shows a pre­view of a prod­uct on touch, or on hov­er, when users are view­ing an image on a web­site or app.

Slate Make Up

Rather than using an app, Slate Cos­met­ics have made the deci­sion to imple­ment the inter­ac­tive con­tent on a high­ly mobile opti­mized web­site, which will be launched in a cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing cam­paign tied togeth­er close­ly with social media and organ­ic search.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Slate is the first cos­met­ics brand to imple­ment a 100 per­cent dig­i­tal launch, with dis­tri­b­u­tion only through ecom­merce chan­nels. It means that cre­at­ing a aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence for users to try and sam­ple prod­ucts vir­tu­al­ly even more impor­tant.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, Proc­ter & Gam­ble’s Cov­er­Girl test­ed an ear­ly ver­sion of Mod­i­face’s Look­ing Glass tech­nol­o­gy on Cosmopolitan.com. L’O­re­al Gar­nier also imple­ment the tech­nol­o­gy as part of their con­tin­ued dri­ve to progress inno­v­a­tive dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. Suc­cess­ful make­up and beau­ty retail­er Sepho­ra is also using the tech­nol­o­gy at in-store kiosks in cer­tain Euro­pean stores.

And the tech­nol­o­gy does have one cru­cial ben­e­fit in addi­tion to ful­fill­ing a touch­point in user expe­ri­ences. As Slate Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor Gen­try Ford point­ed out:

[When] going to Sepho­ra and hav­ing to try on a make­up that’s been used by count­less oth­er peo­ple. Who knows where those hands have been? We’re hop­ing to elim­i­nate pink­eye all togeth­er.”

Digital Makeup Counters

A “soft launch” of Slate’s ini­tia­tive is under­way on social media, but this will soon be fol­lowed up by paid and native adver­tis­ing in the peak of the cru­cial win­ter shop­ping peri­od.

The inter­ac­tive con­tent ini­tia­tive is a bold move from Slate, and the com­ing months will deter­mine whether the abil­i­ty to sam­ple prod­ucts dig­i­tal­ly will meet con­sumer demands, and the tried and test­ed expe­ri­ence of using make­up coun­ters in depart­ment stores.

How­ev­er, the tech­nol­o­gy cer­tain­ly has great poten­tial. When con­sumers reg­is­ter with Mod­i­face, they upload an image of their pho­to to the Look­ing Glass appli­ca­tion. Assum­ing they leave their cook­ies intact, future imple­men­ta­tions of the tech­nol­o­gy could see users see­ing dis­play adver­tise­ments fea­tur­ing them­selves as mod­els, effec­tive­ly bridg­ing togeth­er make­up coun­ters and mag­a­zines seam­less­ly with­in the online con­sumers expe­ri­ence.

While Slate’s exam­ple is spe­cif­ic to the cos­met­ics niche, the ini­tia­tive fits into a much wider trend among dig­i­tal mar­keters: per­son­al­ized adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing efforts. This tech­nol­o­gy will be worth watch­ing if con­sumers find it gen­uine­ly use­ful in aid­ing their pur­chase deci­sions.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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