The Personal Touch

Envision a world where your face cream is tailor-made for your DNA, your hair mask knows you got highlights last Thursday, and your serum has a better handle on your likes, your dislikes—even what you had for breakfast— than your partner. Innovators from the worlds of tech and beauty are dreaming up these hyperpersonalized beauty products right now, and they’ll be in our hands as early as this year. If half—hell, if a quarter—of the predictions in this story pan out, the next generation of lipsticks and hydrators will be virtually unrecognizable.

- Elizabeth Siegel

In the next year...sheet masks will go high-tech. Yes, they make skin dewy fast—but if you buy one that’s not the best fit for your face, they can also cause serum to leak into your eyes and get uncomfortably close to your mouth. A first world problem, yes, but annoying enough that Neutrogena has created 3-D-printed sheet masks, called Neutrogena MaskID, that are tailored to your face shape. (They’ll be available in the next six months.) “The same facial-recognition technology that lets you open your iPhone X by looking at your screen also allows us to scan and create a 3-D model of your face in our app,” says Michael Southall, global research and development lead for beauty tech and devices at Johnson & Johnson. To print the customized sheet masks, he and his team partnered with experts who specialize in 3-D-printing artificial joints. Maybe even more exciting? The ingredients are also customized. “We can put different ingredients on different facial zones—forehead, cheeks, around the eyes,” says Southall. Neutrogena already has an iPhone attachment, the 360 Skin Scanner, that uses sensors to measure moisture levels on various parts of the face and imaging technology to track wrinkle depth and pore size. Based on these readings, the new MaskID app will recommend ingredient combinations for different facial zones (five ingredients, including hyaluronic acid and vitamin C, will be available at launch). “The possibilities are almost infinite,” says Southall.

Flawless foundation will be just a blue LED device away.