How and why I built an app to teach me makeup
Overcoming Internet Noise to Forge a Personalized Approach to Beauty
Beauty, to me, has always felt overwhelming. The sheer volume of makeup tutorials on YouTube and TikTok rarely felt relevant to me as a brown girl with cool-to-olive undertones. (obligatory appreciation for @makeupbymonicaa, though who is always a brown girl slay!)
Searching for personalized beauty tools only led me to face shape analyzers that charged upfront fees and stopped at basic classifications, offering no real guidance. Frustrated (and, admittedly, having a huge chip on my shoulder), I set out to build my own.
What I Built: StyleSense.io
I built a free tool that uses machine learning to identify facial features like prominent cheekbones, wide foreheads, rounded chins, etc. Each feature gets a confidence score — weak, moderate, or strong — based on prediction outputs from a series of regression models. From these scores, the model suggests up to two potential face shapes, because I recognize that most people don’t fit neatly into one category. My approach treats face shape identification as an art, not a science.
What sets stylesense.io and the models I’ve developed apart is its intellectual honesty. It doesn’t present rigid rules but instead offers general suggestions tailored to your unique features. And we take this idea further by developing custom makeup guide filters, which are effectively personalized tutorials tailored to your features.
The Response So Far
Today, the app has 2,000 active users per day. And genuinely, hearing from users who find it helpful is why I continue to invest time and effort into it (this app barely breaks even, y’all).
When I first shared this tool on Reddit, the feedback was incredible. The post became highly upvoted, with many people sharing how they felt similarly overwhelmed by traditional makeup advice. To this day, that Reddit post drives traffic to the app.
Why It Matters
This tool isn’t just about makeup; it’s about empowering users to embrace and exprss their sense of self. I feel that I’ve created something that is personal and genuinely helpful — a resource I wish I had when I was starting my own makeup journey. There’s still so much to do.
For now, I’m excited to keep improving and helping more people feel confident in their makeup journeys. In future installments, I’ll share more about how I’m approaching growth and monetization, and the plans I have to make the tool even better.
