Express News Service

Themassive shift towards online businesses, driven by the pandemic, is noticable especially in the self-care and wellness segment. Cashing in on the scenario, House of Beauty launched its new e-commerce platform boddess.com with AR/VR technology; over 60 skincare, make up, hair care and fragrance brands onboard; and contactless delivery to your doorstep. In July, they launched an app to refine the consumer shopping experience. Excerpts from an interview with Founder and CEO Ritika Sharma:

What was the idea behind Boddess?

We aspire to change the way people discover beauty and grooming. Also, we wanted to create a holistic experience through a superior technology led e-Commerce platform that puts the customer at the forefront and provides value from every aspect. External beauty to internal wellness.

How is Boddess different from other beauty websites?

Our technology makes us stand out. Our in-house proprietary AR/VR skin diagnostic, make-up try-on tools and hand-picked artist talent in areas of hair, skin and make-up, are onboard full-time.

How many experts do you have on board?

We have multiple celebrity experts and influencers for hair care, makeup and skin care including Anu Kaushik, Rod Anker, Dr Geetika Mittal and Manjari Singh.

What tools does the app provide?

The Boddess Virtual Pro allows customers to accurately diagnose their skin condition, try on makeup virtually and get recommended product solutions. The Boddess Edit offers access to celebrity and in-house makeup, hair and skin experts to engage with, learn about new skincare recipes, tips. The Boddess Virtual Pro Skin Diagnostic tool assesses wrinkles, fine lines, blemishes and inflammation, pigmentation, sensitivity/ redness, pores, dark spots and circles.

The Virtual Makeup Tool allows customers to choose options from colour cosmetic brands for lip, eye, foundation, and blush in real time. Boddess Virtual Pro will soon launch the Eyebrow Virtual Pro soon. How will AR/VR technology cash in on more customers? The Boddess Virtual Pro was designed to solve one of the biggest pain points customers unable to try on products at an e-commerce platform. Led by MIT leadership, we developed this technologically futuristic, yet implementable solution to create value for our customers.

Will this technology help in skin treatments and consultations?

Our team spent the past few months building our Machine Learning database of skin types in partnership with leading dermatologists in India. We take thousands of high-resolution images of men and women and tag their skin condition with our proprietary collection of skin metrics (things like hydration, wrinkles, dark spots, skin age etc.). We make sure to train our algorithms on a diverse array of skin colours, ages, and ethnicities, and then train our algorithms on this data set and build supervised machine learning models to improve this algorithm every week. More images we collect, the better it gets.

Is AR/VR technology the future of the beauty industry?

With COVID limiting physical interactions in stores, AR/VR is the next evolution in product try on. From virtual try on, digital catalogues for social selling to 3D printed makeup tools, customised cosmetic and skincare product requests in one click to 3D face masks and voice-based technology are all in the pipeline across startups and big organisations. For example; finding the perfect foundation shade, out of 9,000 shades, now takes less than a minute.

Read more:

AR/VR is the next evolution in product try on, says House of Beauty CEO Ritika Sharma - The New Indian Express