Perhaps to the initial dismay of some employees, Grace Choi is not an idea repeater.
"I never like doing the same thing twice," says the augmented reality filter creator, who knows the key to breaking the tedium of a typical TikTok scroll through her craft depends on the balance between functionality and novelty.
More from WWDAlthough Choi has been innovating in the beauty industry for more than a decade - she debuted the first 3D makeup printer through her company Mink in 2014 - she only started launching her AR Effect House platform in beta mode with TikTok in 2021. serious about creating social media filters.
"I thought there just wasn't really a platform that was right for it," says Choi, who previously tried Meta's analog Spark AR program but decided it "wasn't as conversational as TikTok, which was so creative and interactive." was - it was a great environment to just experiment."
Rather than adding to the tide of beauty filters that distort or exaggerate a user's facial features, Choi sought to introduce filters with a function - 'utility filters', she has since coined them - either in terms of their ability to create a to solve user problem, makeup application and so on.
Her first filter was inspired by her own personal dilemma: mastering the perfect eyebrows.
Using the mathematical concept of the golden ratio - which conveys the idea of a perfect or symmetrical composition - Choi created a filter that maps out how a user can best fill in their eyebrows to match the proportions of their face. A month after its debut, people started to understand.
"Someone in Mexico used it, and then the filter started swirling from there," says Choi, whose inaugural filter has amassed more than 3 billion views across more than 281,000 posts since its debut in 2022. "Then [launch]I felt validated, like, 'Okay, people want this.'"
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It didn't take long before brands wanted to join in on the momentum. Choi soon introduced a blush placement filter in collaboration with Patrick Starr's One/Size to promote the launch of a new blush trio; a bronzer placement filter from Nars Cosmetics, and a slew of others from Dior Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics and more; each filter serves as a tool for a specific need.
"I've always felt that beauty moments and experiences - especially things you would do in the store, like matching shades or colors, or even makeup tutorials - could be much more personal and immersive with the help of augmented reality" , says Choi, who recently collaborated with Kosas on a 'Find Your Undertone' filter to accompany the expansion of the brand's Revealer Concealer color range.
Introduced in 2020, Revealer Concealer was among the first class of TikTok viral beauty products. In response to feedback that the product's color range was not entirely suitable for consumers with cool or neutral undertones, Kosas unveiled an additional 11 shades in early 2024, bringing the total range to 38 shades.
"We thought about how we could launch a product with a splash and move the conversation forward: 'have you seen this viral product trending on TikTok?' said Adeline Leong, Kosas chief marketing officer.
The brand engaged six large-scale influencers to get the filter launch off the ground, and organic adoption was rapid; within two weeks, the filter had been viewed 160 million times across approximately 48,000 TikTok videos. More than 40 of these videos received more than 1 million views, some of which came from creators with just a few hundred followers.
"We saw the filter as an educational tool," Leong said. "TikTok can be one of those 'let the influencer say your product is the best' world, and it's really oversaturated at the moment; we want [our consumer] to get into a Sephora, but we also want to start the conversation online where it's already happening."
For Choi, who keeps a list of possible filter ideas based on what she sees the beauty community discussing online, facilitating conversations is an important goal of the creative process.
"TikTok not only provides the technology to create these filters, but also the social aspect where you can see someone who looks like you using the filter, and it kind of gives you a social validation of 'she's using this filter and she looks like me '. - maybe I have a cool undertone.' It creates this community shopping environment," Choi said.
Ulta Beauty Collective member and filter maker Zahava Ben-Haim (@makeup2themaxx) is also trying to enrich the online discourse with her signature randomizer filters, the first of which was a Rare Beauty blush shade randomizer that she debuted in June 2023.
"Creators found it very difficult to deal with PR [mailers]. It can get difficult when you receive such a large volume of product, so I thought, "What's a way for us to interact with the mailer and keep it going?" because usually you get one video where it's like, 'Okay, let me try this blush and I'm done,'" says Ben-Haim, who spent years working as a cosmetic chemist and beauty marketer before turning to creating content. 19 pandemic.
The filter eventually ended up on the Rare Beauty team's own For You page, prompting celebrity founder Selena Gomez to try out the filter herself in a video that racked up more than 1 million likes.
"When we saw the blush randomizer, we thought, 'This is brilliant - why didn't we think of this?'" says Ashley Murphy, vice president of consumer marketing at Rare Beauty, who then asked Ben-Haim to create one. to make a bracket. filter that allowed users to determine their favorite Rare Beauty product, as part of the brand's third anniversary that summer.
"If you go back and look at some of them [bracket] videos, some say, "oh, this is so hard," or people sit there for several seconds thinking and engaging with the brand, "Do I choose the lip oil? Do I choose the blush?' kind of a desert island situation," Murphy said.
Ben-Haim's other popular creations include a "Drugstore beauty" randomizer, which chooses the brand a person should use for each makeup step and spawns a subsequent "Luxury makeup" randomizer; a product ranking filter she used to separately rank Ariana Grande's fragrance collection and Hailey Bieber's Rhode range, and an "Ulta Beauty picks my next purchase" filter.
"You can tell when someone discovers my page because they will use all the filters within a week," says Ben-Haim, who counts 106,000 followers on TikTok and whose 12 filters have amassed more than 222 million views.
A suggestion from influencer Mikayla Nogueira prompted Ben-Haim to introduce a 'Clean beauty' regimen randomizer, and she recently collaborated with MAC Cosmetics on a lip shade randomizer, integrated via QR code into the The brand's 40th anniversary Macximal Silky Matte Lipstick mailer. of its founding this year.
"I think those big 'wow' beauty mailers are still relevant. Obviously brands want to get our attention, I just want to make sure people don't miss the point of interacting and playing with the product, rather than a brand handing them a box and hoping for a review," said Ben-Haim.
In other cases, the benefit of functional filters lies in their ability to strengthen a brand without involving the kind of overt advertising that TikTok users are tired of anyway.
For example, neither Choi's Kosas Undertone Filter nor her 'Match Stix Snatch' Fenty Beauty Contour Filter contain any mention of their respective affiliate brand - just subtle nods to their signature color schemes.
"You want as many people as possible to use the filter, so the less branded it is, the better," says Choi, who makes sure brand employees are verbally mentioned in each filter kick-off video. "TikTok is an echo chamber, so if I say 'this filter from Fenty Beauty,' the next person will do the same thing - you don't need those hyper-branded elements."
While the majority of Choi's beauty filters to date have been cards (or filters that guide product placement in some way), the undertone seeker marks the beginning of the next part of her creation journey, where she expects that cards won't be the only or the best way to engage consumers through utility filters.
"This is technology and this is beauty - two spaces that are constantly evolving and that consumers are constantly growing tired of," she said. "Maybe it was cards last year, or undertones this year; They are completely different disciplines, but the common thread is that you solve a problem for a customer in beauty."
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