TOKYO — Shiseido is entering the IoT realm. Aiming to provide customers with fully personalized skin care that automatically adjusts based on conditions at any given time, the Japanese beauty company will start beta trials of a new system next spring.
The skin-care system, called Optune, uses a specially developed machine and a dedicated smartphone app to cater products to specific skin-care needs. Customers take a photo of their skin using their phones, and the app analyzes the skin’s condition at that exact moment. It also factors in temperature, humidity levels, mood and menstrual cycle. The data is then sent to the machine, called Optune Zero, via the cloud. Optune Zero is loaded cartridges filled with skin-care products. The machine uses unique algorithms to analyze the data from the app and to determine the best serum and moisturizer combination from over 1,000 available patterns. The serum and moisturizer are dispensed directly from the machine.
Shiseido will begin testing the Optune system in Japan in spring 2018. After improvements are made based on customer experiences, the company hopes to follow the beta version with a full-scale introduction as soon as possible.
“Skin is a key to one’s own beauty; it changes every day, every moment, in association with not only individual skin qualities (genetic elements) but also external factors such as weather, internal factors such as mood and condition, and other factors including those related to age, that are all intricately linked to one another,” the company said in a release. “This time, we focused on the possibility of delivering the optimum beauty solution to each and every consumer by coupling new digital technology with Shiseido’s research findings, which have long been accumulated through observations of a vast array of skin conditions.”