by Some collaborators may initially be disappointed that Grace Choi is not a repeater of ideas.
“I never like to do the same thing twice,” said the creator of the augmented reality filter, who knows the key to interrupting the tedium of ordinary TikTok scrolling through his craft that hangs in the balance of functionality and the news.
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While Choi has been innovating in the beauty industry for more than a decade — she debuted the first 3D makeup printer in 2014 through her company, Mink — it wasn’t until TikTok launched its Effect House AR platform in beta mode in 2021 she started to get really into the creation of a social media filter.
“I thought there wasn’t a platform that was right for it,” said Choi, who tried Meta’s Spark AR analog program but decided it “wasn’t as conversational as TikTok, which was as creative and interactive — it was. a great environment to experiment with.”
Rather than adding to the array of beauty filters that distort or exaggerate a user’s facial features, Choi sought to introduce filters with function — “utility filters,” as she has since coined them — in terms of their ability to solve a user’s quandary, guidance. makeup application, and so on.
Her own personal dilemma inspired her first filter: mastering the perfect brows.
Using the mathematical concept of the golden ratio – which conveys the idea of perfect or symmetrical makeup – Choi created a filter that shows a user how best to fill in their brows to suit their facial proportions. A month after the first start, people started arriving.
“Someone in Mexico used it, and then the filter started to spread around from there,” said Choi, whose inaugural filter has received more than 3 billion views across 281,000 additional posts since its launch in 2022. . “After that [launch]I felt validated – like, ‘OK, people want this’”
It wasn’t long before brands wanted in on the momentum too. Choi introduced an early blush placement filter in collaboration with Patrick Starr’s One/Size to promote the launch of a new blush trio; a bronzer placement filter by Nars Cosmetics, and a steady stream of others by Dior Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics and more—each filter serves as a tool for a specific need.
“I’ve always felt that beauty moments and experiences—especially things you’d do in the store like shade or color matching, or even makeup tutorials—could be much more personalized and immersive using augmented reality,” a said Choi, said the latest. collaboration 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 cater to cool or neutral-wearing consumers, Kosas unveiled 11 additional shades at the top of 2024, bringing the total variety to 38 shades.
“We were thinking how can we launch a product with a splash and move the conversation further, ‘have you seen this viral product trending on TikTok?” said Kosas chief marketing officer Adeline Leon.
The brand used six large-scale influencers to get the filter launch off the ground, and organic adoption was rapid; within two weeks, the filter had collected 160 million views across about 48,000 TikTok videos. More than 40 of these videos surpassed 1 million views, some of which came from creators with a few hundred followers.
“We saw the filter as an educational tool,” Leong said. “TikTok can be a world where ‘just get the influencer to talk about your product being the best product,’ and it’s really oversaturated right now; we would like [our consumer] to enter 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 also the social aspect where you can see someone like you using the filter, and it gives you this kind of social confirmation that this filter is she’s using it and she’s like me — maybe I’m a nice person.’ It creates this community shopping environment,” Choi said.
Ulta Beauty Collective member and filter creator Zahava Ben-Haim (@makeup2themaxx) seeks to enrich online discourse through her signature random filters, the first of which was the Rare Beauty blush shade randomizer she debuted in June 2023.
“Creators found it very difficult to interact with PR [mailers]. It can get difficult when you’re getting such a high volume of products, so I thought, ‘what’s a way for us to interact with the sender and keep it going?’ because usually you get one video where it’s like, ‘Okay, let me try this blush and I’m done,'” said Ben-Haim, who spent years as a cosmetic chemist and beauty marketer before turning it’s on content creation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The filter eventually landed on the Rare Beauty team’s own For You page, prompting celebrity founder Selena Gomez to try the filter herself in a video that has been liked by more than a million people.
“When we saw the blush randomizer we were like, ‘this is great—why didn’t we think of this?'” said Ashley Murphy, vice president of consumer marketing at Rare Beauty, who tapped Ben-Haim to bracket to create. a filter that allowed users to determine their favorite Rare Beauty product, as part of the brand’s third anniversary celebration that summer.
“If you go back and look at some of those [bracket] videos, some of them are like, ‘Oh, this is so hard,’ or people are actually sitting there thinking for multiple seconds as they engage with this brand, ‘Do I pick the lip oil? Do I pick the blush?’ kind of a desert island,” Murphy said.
Ben-Haim’s other popular topics include a “Drugstore beauty” randomizer, which chooses the brand a person must use for each makeup step and then spawns a “Luxury makeup” randomizer; a product ranking filter she used to rank Ariana Grande’s fragrance collection and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode assortment separately, and an “Ulta Beauty picks my next buy” filter.
“You can tell when someone finds my page, because they use all the filters in a week,” said Ben-Haim, who counts 106,000 followers on TikTok and whose 12 filters have more amassing more than 222 million collective views.
A recommendation from influencer Mikayla Nogueira prompted Ben-Haim to introduce a “Clean Beauty” regimen randomizer, and most recently she partnered with MAC Cosmetics on a lip shade randomizer, integrated via QR code into the brand’s Maxximal Silky Matte Lipstick mailer at 40th anniversary celebration. for its establishment this year.
“I think those big, ‘wow’ beauty mailers are still relevant – obviously brands are trying to get our attention, I just want to make sure people aren’t missing the point of interaction and playing with the product to lose, compared to spending a brand. box for them and expect a review,” said Ben-Haim.
In other cases, the benefit of functional filters is to increase their brand potential without the kind of overt advertising that TikTok users are, in any case, tired of.
For example, neither Choi’s Kosas undertone filter nor Fenty Beauty’s “Match Stix Snatch” contour filter bear any reference to their respective brand affiliations—just subtle nods to their signature color schemes.
“You want as many people as possible to use the filter, so the less branded it is, the better,” said Choi, who makes sure to name brand collaborators word of mouth in any filtered video. “TikTok is an echo chamber, so if I say ‘this filter is by Fenty Beauty,’ the next person will do the same thing — you don’t have to have those hyper-branded elements.”
While most of Choi’s beauty filters to date have been maps – or filters that guide product placement in some way – the gem finder is embarking on the next phase of her creative journey, and she reckons it won’t just be about maps of that period. or the best way to attract consumers through utility filters.
“This is technology and this is beauty — two spaces that are constantly evolving and that consumers are always tired of,” she said. “Maybe last year it was maps, or this year it was about maps – they’re completely different disciplines, but the common thread is that you’re solving a problem for a beauty customer.”
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