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Beauty AR SDK

What Is AR Beauty and How It Benefits Makeup, Salons, and Retail

AR beauty technology has become a game-changer for many beauty brands from makeup and offline salons to retail and entertainment. Augmented reality beautification helps companies provide real-time try-on solutions, tune users' appearance during video calls, enhance medical surgery training, and more.

Still, many makeup brands, entrepreneurs, and tech teams wonder if they need beauty AR features for their businesses and projects and how they can implement solutions time- and cost-efficiently.

If it resonates with your current needs, this post will guide you through:

- How beauty AR technology works

- 5 must-try features of beauty AR

- Core ways to add beautification functionality to your app: SDK and API.

Beauty AR Technology

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TL;DR:

  • AR beauty is technology that retouches a person's appearance with augmented reality;
  • Relevant effects include facial feature editing, face retouching, AR makeup, etc.;
  • See the step-by-step integration instructions below for details on how to integrate these effects into your app.

What Is AR Beauty Technology

Beauty AR is a simple and easy-to-use Photoshop option in the pocket for anyone with a smartphone. The digital face beautification technology allows users to tune, retouch, or change any aspect of their appearance in an instant. It is a part of a broader "beauty tech" term that also includes other similar software.

beautificationBeauty AR Technology For Photo And Video Processing

AR solution companies advanced the visual effects so far that beauty industry users can go beyond mere retouching. They can naturally transform into someone else trying on styles, makeup outlooks, and hairstyles with a tap.

With advanced computer vision and deep learning algorithms under the hood, digital face beautification does the job so perfectly that sometimes it’s hard to say what’s real. 

How Developers Benefit From Beauty AR Technology

By integrating face editing features into their apps, developers can increase their active user base and session time. Face altering is still a novelty and can spread on social media like a fire. It’s a great tool to drive traffic to the app organically, by “word of mouth”. It takes one celeb to share a selfie, and the rest will pick up the new beauty industry trend.

Beauty filters in telecommunications and video conferencing remove the barrier to distant communication. With them, users can enjoy conversation without having to worry about their appearance.

Standalone beauty tech apps are in demand too. Over the recent years, they have grown in numbers due to the pool of benefits they deliver. They are easy to target and monetize for makeup brands and beauty industry companies.

The latest trend in beauty AR is Guided Virtual Makeup Try-On. It combines the fidelity and accuracy of virtual makeup with AI analytics that suggests the best cosmetics for each user based on their looks.

Power Your App with Banuba Beauty AR SDK Get Free Trial

Must-Try AR Makeup and Beauty Features for Your App

Today’s most popular beauty tech tools include morphing, face tuning, virtual makeovers, filtering, and facial feature adjustments. Each of these features finds its application in a variety of domains. Here, we take a closer look at how to face editing works and its use cases.

Face Morphing

Morphing allows users to change the size and shape of the face. By moving the vertices of the 3D model of the face, you can slim down cheeks, chin, and nose to name facial features more delicate. 

morping allFace Beauty API Demo: Morphing

On the technical side, morphing effects are designed with the face mesh applied to the base mask. The example below shows the base mask (pink contour) and the morphing effect (green contour). The morphed face mask is applied to the recognized user with the help of face tracking technology and artificial intelligence. 

face morph exampleBeauty Filter: Base Mask and Morphing Effect 

Video Face Beautification 

Portrait beautification includes tools, filters, and algorithms to enhance the face. Among its primary components helping to improve the user's attractiveness are skin smoothing, also called face softening, teeth whitening, LUTs, and eyes-effect. 

The face beautification technology can be integrated as an all-in-one retouch filter to address camera distortion and improve the video communication experience. These features can be used separately in full-featured face editing apps where the main goal is to enhance a selfie.

Face Retouching

In contrast with face beautification aimed to enhance the image, the blemish removal tools can help users fix their appearance imperfections. Users can remove acne, wrinkles, spots, and eye bags in photos. The artificial intelligence is trained to perform specific tasks based on the input face data like skin tone.

eye bag removal Face Beauty API Demo: Eye Bag Removal

AI retouching achieves the most realistic effect similar to professional photography. The example below showcases the face skin smoothing algorithm. Unlike the blur filters that can make a face over-smoothed, the algorithm retains the skin texture and achieves natural beauty, showing that the first word in "beauty tech" is more important than the second.

pjimage (1)-1Face Beauty API Demo: Skin Smoothing

AR Makeup (Coloring)

AR makeup technology has firmly established itself in cosmetics industry, allowing people to test beauty products virtually with facial detection. It’s also widely popular in face editors, and photo and video retouching apps where users can have fun with different makeup looks and hair colors.

ar hair colorFace Beauty API Demo: AR Hair Color

Whether you’re developing a makeup app, building a smart beauty mirror, or looking to power your cosmetics web store with virtual try-on, AR makeup technology creates a true-to-life digital experience of physical products.

Face Modifiers 

AI-powered face modification technologies can drastically change a face. Aging filters to visualize how you could look in the future. Face Swap algorithms that merge two faces for entertainment purposes like in Snapchat or stand-alone face editing apps. Here is an example of lips-changing algorithms that can add volume.

lips reshareFace Beauty API Demo: Lips Reshape

Lips morphing can be integrated with medical apps to demonstrate the effect of a lips filler simulator. Unlike filter-based morphing, it builds on a lips segmentation neural network to accurately detect the shape of a user's lips and realistically augment them.

How to Add Beauty AR Features to Your App: SDK and APIs

If you want to integrate the face editing features into your app, Beauty AR SDK is worth your attention. Depending on the feature set, the SDK is supplied with Face Beauty API or Makeup API. 

The API allows you to call face editing features in your app using predefined methods. Instead of delving into SDK core functionality and writing code, you can use the corresponding methods to edit the face. 


Face Beauty API

The Face Beauty API calls methods are designed to help you integrate face modification and touch-up functionality into your app. It aims to make the user feel comfortable about the camera experience.


Makeup API

The Makeup API allows you to integrate virtual makeup try-on features into your app. Users can test contouring, foundation, eye makeup, lipstick, and more. You can create AR try on experiences from single products, and combined makeup filters to complete virtual makeovers.

Both the Makeup API and Beauty API use the same face effect to call beautification or makeover features. As a result, you can easily combine these features in your app to develop full-featured face editors that match your audience and use case.

Power Your App with Banuba Beauty AR SDK Get Free Trial

7 Beauty AR Technology Use Cases

Beauty tech try on for cosmetics industry and face editing functionality can be perfectly used as a standalone app or integrated into other apps. Here are apps and features you can build with Face Beauty API.


Photo and video editing software

Using Face Beauty API, you can develop full-featured face editor apps or integrate them into your photo and video editing software. Face editing technology makes apps more feature-rich and increases user engagement giving users multiple options to modify their appearance.

MorphingLet users morph features independently as in photo editors


Live streaming

Beauty filters integrated with live streaming apps can inspire users to generate more content. The AR beauty technology runs perfectly on all mobile platforms and the web.


Video conferencing

Skin smoothing and AR beauty filters can automatically enhance the user's appearance during virtual meetings. 


Entertainment

Beauty AR features can come as part of augmented reality filters and masks together with rich graphics and animation. Users can enjoy to the fullest the most quality and varied filters like Snapchat or TikTok provides.

funny effect 2Bring in fun morph filters in your Snapchat-like app


Medical apps

Let users preview the effects of plastic surgery: fillers, facelifting, or botox. 


Beauty salon apps

The augmented reality technology allows beauty salons to demonstrate cosmetic procedures' before/after effect and demo skincare products.

skin recolorShowcase skin tan before and after effect


Video chat apps

Many apps integrate video chat and camera presenting functionality. Beauty AR features can be a valuable add-on to music and karaoke apps, dating apps, and social games to enhance the user experience.

Summing up

Today, face editors are among the most widespread applications available across the entire spectrum of beauty tech. The Global Photo Editing Software Market was estimated at $773.3 million in 2019, with a projection to grow to $1,485.2 million by 2027. 

Companies in cosmetics industry, video communications, and social media have embraced face beautification technology making it part and parcel of their digital offerings. As users are getting more selective and the technology becomes more common, developers struggle to market new camera apps effectively. Discover how you can create an unparalleled Beauty augmented reality experience in your app with our technology.

Power Your App with Banuba Beauty AR SDK Get Free Trial

FAQ
  • AR makeup is the augmented reality-powered technology for beauty and retail brands which is mostly known as a real-time virtual try-on solution. It means users can apply lipsticks, foundation, blushes, powders, eye liners and shadows online. 

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