The High-tech Skin Care Aisle

When I imagine the latest in electronic innovation being unveiled last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, I didn’t exactly expect electronic innovation at the beauty counter. Yet, lo and behold, skincare company Neutrogena managed to find a way to make us feel badly about ourselves using a combination of sensors and an app.

The SkinScanner, which is the latest in connected beauty products, attaches to the top of most smartphones and can capture close-up images of a user’s face with a combination of sensors. Once the images are captured, they can be uploaded into a corresponding app where they are magnified and analyzed.

The app — called Skin360 — tracks the user’s skin health over time using these close-up images and offers suggestions for improvement. The device/app can offer the user readings about pore size, moisture levels and wrinkles, assigning a score, up to 100, for each of the areas under observation. Then, using machine learning, the app will compare images of the user’s skin with the images of others in the same age range.

And, in what some might call a display of marketing genius, the app makes recommendations to improve skin, navigating the user, naturally, to the Neutrogena store where the user can purchase cleansers, sunscreen or products with retinol or hyaluronic acid to treat problem areas.

Who wouldn’t want a device that tells you everything you are doing wrong skin-care wise? It is the kind of device that would bookend nicely with, let’s say, a mother-in-law that tells you everything else you are doing wrong.

How would you like to have your skin health measured against your peers? Or worse still, how would you like to be graded on your skin health?

Source: Johnson & Johnson