Notes

Perfect Corp and ModiFace: the try-on you have already used

Last updated: 22 August 2026

Perfect Corp and L'Oréal-owned ModiFace built nearly every branded try-on online, so comparing two brands often means comparing the same engine twice.

Nearly every makeup try-on on a brand's website was not built by that brand. Two companies built almost all of it. Perfect Corp, maker of YouCam Makeup, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022. ModiFace was acquired by L'Oréal on 16 March 2018 and now calls itself a L'Oréal company. The brand's name is on the page. The incentives belong to whichever of the two built it.

The two companies

Who is ModiFace?

ModiFace began as research at the University of Toronto in 2006, by its own account. L'Oréal announced it had bought the company on 16 March 2018, in a press release titled "L'Oréal acquires ModiFace further expanding its worldwide expertise in beauty tech". ModiFace's own site now describes itself in three words: "A L'Oréal Company." It keeps shipping new integrations rather than sitting still inside a parent company: its site states that, coming summer 2026, it will power a virtual try-on experience inside ChatGPT, through a collaboration between L'Oréal and OpenAI.

Who is Perfect Corp?

Perfect Corp was founded in 2015, according to its own investor site, and makes YouCam Makeup along with the AR and AI plug-ins it licenses to other beauty brands. It became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022, under the ticker PERF, a milestone it wrote up on its own blog as "Perfect Corp. Becomes Publicly Traded Company on NYSE". Its business page names M·A·C Cosmetics, Benefit Cosmetics, Clinique and Aveda among the brands it works with.

Side by side

What that means when you compare two brands

If I try a lipstick on Brand A's site and then Brand B's, am I comparing two systems?

Maybe not. If both brands licensed the same engine, you are looking at that one engine wearing two skins, with two different shade libraries loaded into it. The tracking, the rendering and very often the code running in your browser are the same. What changed is the logo and the catalogue sitting behind the button.

How can I tell which one is running on a page?

Look near the try-on button for a small credit line first. Failing that, most browsers let you inspect the page's source or its network requests, and the domain the widget loads from usually gives it away: traffic to modiface.com points to ModiFace, and traffic to perfectcorp.com or a similarly named subdomain points to Perfect Corp. Neither company hides this. They license the technology, not the mystery of which one it is.

Does it matter that the engine is the same?

For the shade itself, not hugely. Perfect Corp and ModiFace run separate tracking and rendering code, and a brand's own shade data still decides what colour shows up on your skin. What carries across every brand running either engine is the incentive underneath it: a licensed try-on tool exists to help you buy from the catalogue it was built around. It was never going to point you to a shade from a brand that did not license it, and it will not tell you the whole look is wrong for you. That is not a flaw in the tool. It is the job the tool was built to do, and it is worth knowing before you read its result as neutral advice.

Is a retailer's try-on, like Sephora Virtual Artist, any different?

It spans more brands than a single brand's own page does, because a retailer stocks many brands at once rather than selling only its own. It still only spans the brands that retailer carries, and it is still a licensed component sitting on the retailer's site rather than something the retailer built from nothing. The incentive moves up one level, from a single brand to a store, and stops there.

Where Looksmith sits

Looksmith, an iOS app from Mirable Labs, Inc. that is coming soon and not released yet, is not a licensee of either company and is not built around one brand's catalogue. You save a Looksmith Likeness once, a set of selfies that becomes your reusable face, and Looksmith renders a complete look onto your own photograph rather than one product from one shelf. Looksmith keeps your own pose, framing and expression instead of pasting your face onto a model's photograph, and it will not reshape your face while it does any of that.

That is a design difference, not a claim that Looksmith renders a truer lipstick than Perfect Corp's engine or ModiFace's does. Nobody has measured that, Looksmith included, and a page that claimed it would be doing the exact thing this one just described: dressing up an incentive as a neutral verdict.

The plain version

Two companies, one wholly owned by a cosmetics conglomerate and one traded in public, sit behind almost every "try it on" button you have clicked on a beauty brand's website. That is not a scandal. It is a licensing market, and it runs the way licensing markets run: whoever pays for the engine gets a say in what it shows you. Knowing that does not make Perfect Corp's tracking worse or ModiFace's rendering dishonest. It changes the question worth asking when you use either one, which is not "is this accurate" but "whose catalogue is this drawing from."