If you find yourself regularly watching beauty tutorials on YouTube, you may find yourself a little unsure over the advice. Sure, that £70 lipstick looks good on her, but that’s one expensive mistake to make, if it leaves you looking like a particularly messy vampire.
Fortunately, Google-owned YouTube has a solution, and it uses the magic of your smartphone. With augmented reality (AR), YouTube is launching a feature that will show you what the product looks like when applied to your face, rather than the style icon demonstrating it.
The tool is currently in alpha, but available to try via FameBit, Google’s branded content platform. This is how it works: when you’re on a video that’s been set up to support the ‘virtual try on’, your phone screen will split into two halves, with the YouTuber occupying the top section, and your own live selfie on the bottom. From there you can just tap through various shades and see how they’d look on you.
Google claims it’ll work with a full range of skin tones, thanks to a little help from machine learning and the company is in talks with brands that want to be on board. So far MAC Cosmetics is fully signed up – perhaps impressed by the fact that Google says 30% of test users activated the selfie pane to try on products for themselves.
If you don’t have time to scour through YouTube beauty videos looking for the right match for you, you could just consult our guide to the best eyeliner and best mascara money can buy, of course...
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