This $295 gadget is like a Keurig machine for makeup

Humanity has sequenced the genome and built artificial intelligence, and yet it’s still shockingly hard to find the right foundation shade.

I’ve spent hours at Sephora searching for a shade that doesn’t make my skin look ashy or unnatural. Then, when I finally do find a match, my skin gets darker after a day in the sun, and the color no longer works. I’m not alone in my frustration. Last year, makeup brands sold $8.4 billion of foundation around the world, but you can still find social media brimming with people complaining about how hard it is to find the right shade.

A new brand, Boldhue, wants to solve this problem forever. The company has created a machine that scans your face in three places, then instantly dispenses a customized foundation shade. Using a system similar to Keurig pods, the machine comes with five color cartridges that mix to create the right color; once they run out, you order more.

Boldhue Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Wilson and Artistic Director Sir John [Photo: Boldhue]

The product could revolutionize the way that everyday consumers do their makeup at home—and also make it far easier for professional makeup artists to create the right shade for their clients. Fueled by $3.37 million in venture funding from Mark Cuban’s Lucas Venture Group, BoldHue believes it can bring this technology to all kinds of other cosmetic products.

The Quest To Find Your Shade

Karin Layton, BoldHue’s co-founder and CTO, was an aerospace engineer who worked at Raytheon. Five years ago, she realized that her high-end foundation didn’t accurately match her skin. As a hobby, Layton dabbled in painting and had a fascination with color theory. So she began tinkering with building a machine that would produce a person’s exact skin shade.

During the pandemic, after Layton decided to turn her idea into real company, she brought her childhood friend and serial entrepreneur, Rachel Wilson, as her business partner. “I really resonated with the pain points she was trying to solve because I am half Argentinian,” says Wilson, who is now CEO. “And while I present as white, I have undertones that make it complicated for me to find the right shade. “I always look like a pumpkin or a ghost when I wear foundation.”

[Photo: Boldhue]

Women of color, in particular, have trouble finding the right shade. For years, the makeup industry focused on creating products for caucasian women, leaving Black and brown women to come up with their own solutions.

This only began to change a decade ago. In 2015, I wrote about a chemist at L’Oreal, Balanda Atis, went on a personal quest to develop a darker foundation that wouldn’t make her skin look too red or black. L’Oreal eventually commercialized the product she created and promoted Atis to become the head of the Women of Color lab, which focuses on creating products for women of color. Danessa Myricks, a self-taught makeup artist, spent years mixing her own foundation using dark pigments she found at costume makeup stores and mixed them with drugstore foundations. In 2015, she launched her own beauty brand, Danessa Myricks Beauty, and four years ago, Sephora began to carry it.

[Photo: Boldhue]

Today, there are more options for women of color, but many women still struggle to find the right shade. BoldHue believes the solution lies in technology. Color matching technology already exists, but it is not particularly convenient for consumers. Lancome has a machine that color matches, but it’s only available in certain stores. Sephora has ColorIQ, which scans your face and matches you to different brands. But part of the problem is that your skin tone isn’t static; it is constantly changing based on how much sun exposure you have, especially if you are have a lot of melanin. “If you order a shade online, your complexion may have changed by the time you receive it seven days later,” says Wilson.

Color-Matching At Home

Wilson and Layton believe that having an affordable, at-home solution to color matching could be game-changing. The machine comes with a wand. When you want to create a new foundation shade, you scan your skin on your forehead, your cheek, and your neck. Then the machine instantly dispenses about a week’s worth of that shade into a little container.

The machine can store that shade for you to use in the future. But having the machine in your house means that you can easily re-scan your face after a day at the beach to get a more accurate shade. If there are multiple people in a household (or say, a sorority house) who wear foundation, they can each scan their faces to produce the perfect shade.

And it could transform the work of makeup artists who typically mix their own shades for their clients throughout the day. “They’re lugging around pounds of products to set and are forced to play chemist all day long,” says Wilson. “If we can shade match for them in one minute, they can focus on the artistry part of their job, and they’re wildly excited about that. It also means they can book more clients in a day, because they have more time.”

While on the surface, BoldHue’s technology seems to disrupt to the foundation industry, Wilson believes it could actually empower other makeup brands. Each makeup brand has its own formula that influences the creaminess and coverage of their foundations. BoldHue could create a brand’s formula in the machine, but have the added benefit of highly specific color matches. BoldHue is already in talks to partner with brands to create customized foundations for them, much the way that Keurig partners with brands like Peet’s and Illy to create pods for the coffee machines.

But ultimately, the possibilities go beyond foundation. With this technology BoldHue could create other color cosmetics, from concealer to lipstick to eyeshadow. “We think of ourselves as a technology company with a beauty deliverable,” Wilson says.

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