Contact-less skincare analysis

Dermatology-grade advice without a sales rep in the way.

FirstVal customer — beauty retail chain, South Korea

Beauty retail, in-store and online

37%: More customer engagement
43%: Uplift in product up-sells
5 sec: Skin scan to regimen

01 — The intro

Where the story starts

Post-COVID, cosmetics retail demand fell by around 38% against pre-pandemic levels, and customer preference shifted hard toward natural, higher-quality products.

Demand for natural beauty products moved from around 12% CAGR in 2018 to a 120% sales increase by Q4 2020.

The brand wanted a precise skincare recommendation engine across 40+ stores — safer, faster, and accurate for every skin type.

Store estate: 40+
Daily footfall: 800+
Product set: 48+ SKUs

02 — The challenge

A purely AI-based skin recommendation engine: contact-less, precise, and complete without human intervention.

—800+ retail customers walking in daily across the store estate.
—48+ organic SKUs to be mapped against six distinct skin types.
—Reports needed for uneven tone, texture, wrinkles, puffy eyes, dark circles, acne, red spots, scars and dark spots.
—Every scan had to produce a regimen and a scannable product the shopper could buy on the spot.

Improve

Analysis accuracy and basket size

Reduce

Contact staff time and shopping time

03 — The solution

A real-time computer vision pipeline running on tablets in-store, producing a skin report and a matched regimen in seconds.

01Data annotation across skin types and skin concerns.
02Ensemble models trained to run on mobile and Android tablet cameras.
03Real-time skin analysis pipeline producing a structured skin report.
04Detection of uneven tone, texture, wrinkles, puffy eyes, dark circles, acne, red spots, scars and dark spots.
05Regimen matching against the organic product line.
06Skin health stored and tracked over time per customer.
07Micro-services architecture for scale with PII treatment.
Impact
Customer engagement and sales up 37%.

04 — Value logic

How operating change reaches financial value

Five-second analysis

A tablet scan converts visible concerns into a structured skin report.

More consultations served with less sales-associate effort.

Regimen matching

Each condition maps to AM, PM and weekly product combinations.

Higher basket depth and more relevant up-sells.

Longitudinal tracking

Customers can see skin-condition changes across visits.

Stronger engagement, return visits and brand affinity.

05 — Feature delight

What people actually felt

Accurate scan

Eight skin concerns detected and translated into precise recommendations rather than generic advice.

Auto regimens

AM, PM and weekly regimens assembled per skin concern, condition and type.

06 — Ground impact

What moved, and by how much

43%

Sales uptick

In-store sales across the South Korean estate.

114 days

First pilot

Live across 40+ locations.

37%

Engagement increase

Skin tracking raised brand affinity and repeat visits.

5 sec

Per scan

Accurate regimen from thousands of possible combinations.

07 — Measurement

How the result stays accountable

Conversion

Compare scan-to-purchase conversion and products per basket with the prior assisted-shopping flow.

Engagement

Track completed scans, saved reports and repeat scans by store.

Model performance

Review concern detection and recommendation acceptance across different skin types and capture conditions.

08 — CSAT score

Scored by the customer, A+ to D

Accurate, personalised skin reports with automatic regimens — a visible brand differentiator.

A+: Skin analysis and concern tracking
A+: Recommended skin regimens
A+: User experience
A: Overall impact

09 — More customer stories

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