The Personal Touch In The Next Year…

Envision a world where your face cream is tailormade for your DNA, your hair mask knows you got highlights last Thursday, and your serum has a better handle on your likes and your dislikes than your partner. Innovators from the worlds of tech and beauty are dreaming up these super personalised beauty products right now. If half of the predictions pan out, the next generation of lipsticks and hydrators will be virtually unrecognisable.

- Elizabeth Siegel

… Sheet masks will go high-tech Yes, they make skin dewy fast, but if you buy one that’s not the best fit for your face, they can also cause serum to leak into your eyes and get uncomfortably close to your mouth. A first-world problem, but annoying enough that Neutrogena created 3D-printed sheet masks, called Neutrogena MaskiD, that are tailored to your face shape.

“The same facial recognition technology that lets you open your iPhone by looking at your screen also allows us to scan and create a 3D model of your face in our app,” says Michael Southall, global research and development lead for beauty tech and devices at Johnson & Johnson. To print the customised sheet masks, he and his team partnered with experts who specialise in 3D-printing artificial joints. Maybe even more exciting? The ingredients are also customised. “We can put different ingredients on different facial zones – forehead, cheeks, around the eyes,” says Michael. Neutrogena already has an iPhone attachment, the Skin360 Skin Scanner Lens, that uses sensors to measure moisture levels on various parts of the face and imaging technology to track wrinkle depth and pore size. Based on these readings, the new MaskiD app will recommend ingredient combinations for different facial zones (five ingredients, including hyaluronic acid and vitamin C, will be available at launch). “The possibilities are almost infinite,” says Michael.

… Flawless foundation will be just a blue LED device away