Ever wanted a personalized makeup dispenser? Good, BoldHueCo-founder and CTO Karin Layton has built just that: A device that aims to be the “Keurig for makeup.”
BoldHue’s device essentially scans your face and delivers a custom foundation formula that matches your skin tone. The beauty tech startup on Tuesday said it raised a $3.37 million round led by Lucas Venture Group, with participation from Mark Cuban and others.
Layton, a former Raytheon aerospace engineer, came up with the idea when she was getting ready for work one day and realized her expensive new bottle of foundation didn’t match her skin tone. As a painter in her spare time, Layton decided to combine her engineering and knowledge of color theory to create the first of many prototypes.
The bench-sized device, priced at $295 at launch, works by using a “wand” that you place on various parts of your face to capture your skin tone. The device uses a proprietary skin typing algorithm to analyze your skin type and create the correct base shade using five pigments: blue, black, red, yellow and white. He will then grant a week’s foundation.
“At the back end, it pulls that person [data] and getting so many white droplets, red droplets, yellow droplets, so on and so forth,” co-founder and CEO Rachel Wilson told TechCrunch. “It’s really custom for you, because every drop corresponds to your skin.”
The new capital will be used to ship BoldHue’s first round of devices and support recruitment and marketing initiatives. In the coming months, 10,000 units will go out to a waiting list of 40,000 people (most of whom saw BoldHue’s viral TikTok videos) before it becomes available to the general public. BoldHue will also hold a national roadshow, where team members visit major cities to promote the product.
Since the device hasn’t shipped yet, we haven’t been able to test it. However, if accurate, this could be a promising tool for many people. Despite online quizzes or mobile apps that use a photo of your face to match colors to your skin tone, many people still struggle to find the perfect shade. This could be because their skin tone fluctuates due to a medical condition or even just from sun exposure. Additionally, makeup brands have historically neglected shade diversity in their products, and many major companies have been criticized for their lack of darker shades.
“There is a growing need from the consumer to be inclusive, and brands are starting to try to serve that need,” Wilson said. “Online shade-matching quizzes are great, but they put a lot of guesswork on the consumer. And by the time they get it in the mail, it might not match, or one day, the sun changes your complexion and now you’re a different shade. … [Then] it exists in the store, where you go to match the shade, but it is very time-consuming and still limited in nature,” he added.
These types of machines are not new. At the CES 2020 technology conference, L’oreal announced “Perso,” which dispenses a dose of lipstick or foundation that matches your skin tone with the help of its AI-powered mobile app. YSL also sells a custom lipstick creator for $350.
However, BoldHue aims to be a more advanced option. It also dispenses a week’s worth of product, unlike L’oréal’s one-dose machine.
A BoldHue Starter Kit comes with a full cartridge set that includes the first month of foundation, along with additional accessories such as jars and spatulas. Plus, its companion app notifies you when your pigment runs out, so you can buy refills for about $15 to $20 each. The startup will also launch a premium package for makeup artists so they can buy cartridges in bulk.
“On average, you’ll go back and replace about one cartridge a month. So it’s not too over the top and don’t force people to buy everything all the time,” Wilson told us.
Longer term, BoldHue plans to introduce a virtual demo that will offer more customization options. This application will allow users to adjust the amount of pigment according to their preference. Additionally, BoldHue wants to explore partnerships and expand into other makeup categories.
“We’re thinking about how we can serve other pain points in the market with a technology deliverable, whether it’s creating the formulations or working with people who are creating formulations that can be embedded into our device,” Wilson said. “Again, we’re talking about Keurig because it’s similar. They started with their own coffee pods and now it’s Starbucks, Dunkin. … So this is also what we envision for the foundation. We can do anything with color, so we’ll probably get into other categories as well,” he added.
Other investors who participated in the recent seed round include Backstage Capital, Capital Eleven and Tacoma Ventures. BoldHue initially raised $2 million from the company’s friends and family, bringing the total raised so far to around $5 million.
