Would you allow AI to determine your skincare routine?

Skincare is not just skin deep. Picture this: somewhere in the corner of a lab, a human finds the solution for a particular skincare problem. The idea travels through years of research, testing and approvals, finally arriving in the form of a finished product, be it a tube, a bottle or any other form of packaging.

Then begins arguably the most important phase in the journey: the art of persuasion. Millions are thrown into the process; people are courted in more and more unique ways. Each iteration of its ad, each press piece, each time the brand name is repeated on the radio, each time an expert recommends it to somebody and each time that somebody recommends it to someone, this art is at work to ensure that the product gets tried by that most elusive of all targets: the buyer.

Now add Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a formidable breaker of that well-honed chain, driven by a singular purpose: to prove that it can think and judge as well as humans, if not better than.

If you ask 38-year-old Indian entrepreneur and resident of Dubai Sohini Datta, it is doing a pretty great job when it comes to ensuring her skin stays healthy. “I have never ever had (this experience) with skincare in my life. Pre-ChatGPT, I used to be a humongous TikTok researcher, as it is also great in recommending skincare, and I picked a lot of products from there. But nothing in my life has made as dramatic a difference as products recommended by ChatGPT,” she exclaims.

As an avid user of ChatGPT, Datta decided to give it a go for her skincare routine a couple of months ago and has not looked back. “ChatGPT is part of my daily life. That is, I use it for multiple things, right? Whether it’s recipes, whether it’s therapy, whether it’s even tarot. For skincare, it was during a time that I was going to rebuy a lot of stuff, because it was just that month when things had finished. And before rebuying, I happened to ask ChatGPT about the products I used. I told it, this is my life. This is my routine. This is my skin. What would you recommend? And then we, ChatGPT and I, worked on it for like an hour to kind of refine it and the products were then selected.”

Searching for youth

Forty-one-year-old Canadian creative professional Lina’s skincare journey with AI started a bit differently. She explains, “I started reading and watching YouTube tutorials and everything; once you hit your 40s, you want to know what you can do to keep your skin looking healthy, more young, and all that without resorting to extreme cosmetic surgery. You start reading about all of these things that are coming up, and products, and the more you read about them, the more you realise that ingredients are very... chemical. And all of them have different purposes. What happens is that the more you learn about them, the more you realise that there are things that cannot be used with other things. There are things that should be used with other things. There are things that you need to alternate on different days, things that work better in the morning, things that work better at night. And it just got really out of hand, and I had all these products in front of me, and I didn’t really know what to do. It was just taking a lot of time for me to wrap my head around the fact that this should be used on this day, this should be used in the morning, and so on and so forth.

“And one of those days, I was like, okay, let me try and putting all of my products into ChatGPT, and then giving it a bit of a background on what I do, my schedules and all that, and then my skin type and see if it can come up with a routine for me. And that’s exactly what it did.

So, it basically took all of this complicated information and created a little schedule for me on how to use all my different products.”

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