Perhaps to the initial dismay of some collaborators, Grace Choi is not an iterator of ideas.
“I never like to do the same thing twice,” said the augmented reality filter creator, who knows the key to cutting through the tedium of a typical TikTok scroll, hanging within a balance of functionality and innovation in his craft.
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While Choi has been innovating in the beauty industry for over a decade — she launched her first 3D makeup printer through her company Mink in 2014 — she didn’t get started until TikTok launched its AR Effect House platform in beta mode in 2021. I’m seriously struggling with creating a social media filter.
“I thought it wasn’t exactly the right platform for that,” said Choi, who had previously tried Meta’s similar Spark AR program but decided it was “not as conversational as TikTok, which is very creative and interactive. It’s just a great environment to experiment with.”
Rather than adding to the pile of beauty filters that distort or exaggerate the user’s facial features, Choi sought to offer filters that had a function (“auxiliary filters,” as he has since coined them). makeup application etc.
Her first filter stemmed from her own personal dilemma: mastering the perfect brows.
Using the mathematical concept of the golden ratio, which conveys the idea of perfect or symmetrical composition, Choi created a filter that shows how the user can best fill in their eyebrows to suit their facial proportions. A month after its debut, people started catching on.
“Someone in Mexico used it and the filter started rolling from there,” said Choi, whose first filter has garnered more than 3 billion views across more than 281,000 posts since its debut in 2022. “After this” [launch]”I felt validated – like, ‘Okay, people want this.'”
It didn’t take long for brands to want to benefit from this momentum. Choi soon introduced a blush placement filter to promote the launch of a new blush trio in collaboration with Patrick Starr’s One/Size; a bronzer insertion filter with Nars Cosmetics and numerous other filters with Dior Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics and more; each filter serves as a tool for a different need.
“I’ve always felt that beauty moments and experiences, especially things you’d do in-store like shadow or color matching or even makeup tutorials, can be much more personal and immersive using augmented reality,” Choi said. She collaborated with Kosas on a “Find Your Undertone” filter to accompany the brand’s expansion of its Revealer Concealer shade range.
Introduced in 2020, Revealer Concealer was among the earliest class of TikTok viral beauty products. However, in response to feedback that the product’s shade range did not fully appeal to consumers with cool or neutral undertones, Kosas launched 11 additional shades in early 2024, bringing the total product range to 38.
“We were thinking about how we could launch a product in an eye-catching way and move the conversation beyond ‘Have you seen this viral product trending on TikTok?'” said Adeline Leong, Kosas’ marketing manager.
The brand tapped six large-scale influencers to launch the filter, and organic adoption was rapid; The filter amassed 160 million views across nearly 48,000 TikTok videos in two weeks. More than 40 of these videos have surpassed 1 million views; some of these came from creators with only a few hundred followers.
“We saw the filter as an educational tool,” Leong said. “TikTok can be such a ‘get the influencer talking about how your product is the best’ world, and it’s really oversaturated right now; we want [our consumer] “We want to walk into a Sephora, but we also want to start the conversation online where it’s already happening.”
For Choi, who keeps a running list of potential filter ideas based on what she sees the beauty community discussing online, facilitating conversation is a key goal of the creative process.
“TikTok not only provides the technology to create these filters, but it also provides the social aspect where you can see someone who looks like you when using the filter and gives you a sort of social validation of ‘they’re using this filter and they look like me’ — maybe I actually have a cool undertone.” This community creates the shopping environment,” Choi said.
Ulta Beauty Collective member and filter creator Zahava Ben-Haim (@makeup2themaxx) also aims to enrich online discourse through her signature randomized filters, the first of which is the Rare Beauty blush color randomizer, which she launched in June 2023.
“Creators were finding it very difficult to engage with PR [mailers]. This can get difficult when you get such a high volume of product, so I thought: ‘What’s a way to engage the mail and keep it going?’ because you usually end up with a video that says, ‘Okay, let me try this blush and I’m done,'” she said. 19 outbreak.
The filter eventually made its way to the Rare Beauty team’s For You Page, prompting celebrity founder Selena Gomez to try the filter herself in a video that garnered over 1 million likes.
“When we saw the blush randomizer, we thought, ‘This is great, why didn’t we think of this?'” says Ashley Murphy, Rare Beauty’s vice president of consumer marketing. “We thought,” he said, then tapped Ben-Haim to create a parenthesis. filter that allowed users to identify their favorite Rare Beauty product as part of the brand’s third anniversary celebration that summer.
“If you go back and watch some of these [bracket] In the videos, some people say, ‘oh, this is so hard,’ or people sit there and really think for a few seconds and engage with the brand on this, ‘Do I choose lip oil? ‘Am I going to choose the blush?’ It’s kind of a desert island situation,” Murphy said.
Ben-Haim’s other popular creations include the “Drugstore beauty” randomizer, which selects the brand one should use for each makeup step and then generates a “Luxury makeup” randomizer; A product sorting filter that Ariana Grande uses to individually sort her fragrance collection and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode range, and an “Ulta Beauty picks my next buy” filter.
“You can tell when someone discovers my page because within a week they will use all the filters,” said Ben-Haim, who has 106,000 followers on TikTok and whose 12 filters have garnered more than 222 million collective views.
A recommendation from influencer Mikayla Nogueira led Ben-Haim to introduce her “Clean beauty” regimen randomizer, and most recently, she partnered with MAC Cosmetics on a lip color randomizer integrated via QR code into the Macximal Silky Matte Lipstick mailbox, celebrating the brand’s 40th anniversary . since its inception this year.
“I think those big, ‘wow’ beauty mailers are still relevant; it’s clear that brands want our attention; I just want to make sure people don’t miss the point of engaging and playing with the product, as opposed to brand-launching. They hand them a box and expect a review,” said Ben-Haim.
In other cases, the benefit of functional filters lies in their ability to reinforce a brand without the need for the kind of overt advertising that TikTok users are invariably tired of.
For example, neither Choi’s Kosas undertone filter nor the “Match Stix Snatch” Fenty Beauty contour filter mentions the relevant affiliate brand; only a slight reference is made to their signature color scheme.
“You want as many people as possible to use the filter, so the less branded it is, the better,” said Choi, who makes a point of verbally mentioning the names of brand collaborators in any filter startup video. “TikTok is an echo chamber, so if I say, ‘This filter for Fenty Beauty,’ the next person will do the same; you don’t need these hyper-branded elements.”
While the majority of Choi’s beauty filters to date have been maps (or filters that guide product placement in some way), the undertone finder marks the beginning of the next leg of her creation journey, during which she predicts maps won’t be the only way to go. or the best way to engage with consumers through benefit filters.
“This technology and this beauty are two areas that are constantly evolving and where consumers are constantly tired,” he said. “Maybe last year it was maps or this year it was undertones; these are completely different disciplines, but the common thread is that you’re solving a problem for a client in the beauty space.”
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