Notes

What is virtual makeup try-on?

Last updated: 22 August 2026

Three different technologies get called virtual makeup try-on, and knowing which one you are looking at tells you what its answer is worth.

Virtual makeup try-on is any tool that shows you cosmetics on a face without the cosmetics touching a face. Three unrelated technologies share the name. An AR filter paints colour onto live video of you. A generative model repaints a photograph you already took. The third is a swatch grid, and the face in it was hired. They answer different questions and they fail in different places.

Three technologies, one name

What is an AR makeup filter?

This is the one you have already used. An AR filter finds your face in the camera feed, tracks a mesh of landmarks on it, and draws colour onto the video every frame. Turn your head and the lipstick turns with you. Most of it runs on your own device, which is why it is instant and why it usually costs nothing.

Two companies supply most of it. Perfect Corp makes YouCam Makeup and licenses AR try-on to beauty brands. ModiFace is the other, and its own site labels it "A L'Oréal company". Sephora Virtual Artist sits in this category too. When a beauty brand's website invites you to try a shade on, you are most often using one of those two with the brand's own name on the page. Perfect Corp's business site names M·A·C among its clients, which is one relationship you can check rather than infer.

What is generative AI makeup try-on?

The second kind does not track anything. You give it a still photograph and a model repaints the pixels of your face with makeup on. There is no live camera and no tracking, so it is slower. What comes back is an image file rather than a moment on screen.

This is what Looksmith does. You save a Looksmith Likeness once, which is a set of selfies that becomes your reusable face, then you pick a look. Looksmith renders that complete look onto your own face and lists the products it used beside it. A Looksmith look takes roughly a minute to render and comes back as a 9:16 poster, with an optional silent four-second looping clip.

Speed is the least of the difference. Looksmith renders one coordinated eye, cheek and lip into a single photograph of you and lists the products behind it, where a brand's AR filter is anchored to that brand's own catalogue and the shade you are pointing at right now.

What is a shade swatch grid?

The third thing is barely a technology at all, and it is everywhere. A product page shows a row of shade circles, you click one, and the model photograph above changes to that shade. Nobody rendered anything for you. The brand shot those images in advance, in a studio, on a hired face.

This is worth more than it sounds. Those photographs are made under controlled light, so they are the most honest picture you will get of a formula's finish and texture. They tell you whether something is matte or wet-looking. They tell you nothing about your own colouring.

The three, side by side

Read the last row first. Each column fails at the thing the other two are for.

What each one gets right and wrong

Which kind of virtual makeup try-on is most common?

AR, and it is not close. It works on hardware people already own, brands can bolt it on without building anything, and the ten results below are what that spread looks like from a search box.

Looksmith ran two checks on 22 August 2026. On Google Trends, United States, five years, the related-query index for "virtual try on glasses" came back 100 against 13 for "virtual makeup try on", so the phrase "virtual try-on" mostly belongs to eyewear rather than to makeup. Looksmith's own pull of the live top ten US results for "virtual makeup try on" that day returned brand-owned first-party try-on pages and nothing else: Maybelline twice, Urban Decay, Ulta GlamLab, Chanel, NYX, Jane Iredale, Too Faced, L'Oréal Paris and MAC. Every one of them a brand's own AR filter rather than an app, a review or an editorial page.

Generative try-on is the newer and much smaller half of the category. AR owns the shade-comparison job on a brand's own site, and has owned it for years.

Is virtual makeup try-on accurate?

Ask what each one is accurate against, because the three are measured against different things.

An AR filter is accurate against a specific product in a specific brand's catalogue, which is the shade the brand itself supplied. What corrupts it is your own camera. White balance, exposure and tone mapping are all being adjusted on the fly and never land in the same place twice, so the same lipstick can read warmer under a bulb than by a window, and a screenshot preserves whatever the camera did rather than the shade itself.

Generative try-on is accurate against the look, not against a barcode. It shows you what a complete look would plausibly be like on your face, in your light. It is not a promise that one particular tube produces that exact pixel. Looksmith treats its own colour and undertone reads as a guide rather than a verdict, and Looksmith publishes no accuracy percentage, because the number would be unmeasured.

A swatch grid is accurate about the product and wrong about you.

Anyone advertising a single accuracy figure across all three has compressed three different measurements into one number.

Will a virtual try-on edit my face?

Only one of the three can change your face at all, and whether it does was somebody's decision rather than a property of the technology.

An AR filter draws over your face and leaves the underlying video alone, but plenty of the apps that carry one also ship a beauty mode in the same screen: skin smoothing, eye widening, jaw slimming. Those are separate features sitting next to each other, and it is easy to have both on without noticing.

A generative model can change anything about a photograph, because it is repainting the photograph. Whether it does comes down to what its makers forbade. Looksmith will not change face geometry of any kind, will not change eyelid topology, so a monolid stays a monolid, and will not change your age, pose, gaze or expression, because what comes back is your own photograph with makeup painted into it rather than a new portrait. Looksmith preserves glasses exactly and never adds them, leaves moles, beauty marks and facial hair alone, adds no piercings or jewellery, and applies no beauty-filter smoothing. Haircuts are out of scope: Looksmith changes hair colour, not length or shape.

So the question to put to any of them is not which technology is safer. It is whether the maker wrote the limits down where you can read them. Looksmith's are the paragraph above.

Do I have to upload a photograph?

For AR, usually not. Most AR filters track your face on the device itself, so the frames stay there.

For generative try-on, yes. The generative products in this category all render on a server, Looksmith included, so the photograph is uploaded. Ask the four questions set out in full in what happens to your selfie in an AI makeup app: whether the image leaves your device, who else gets it, whether it trains a model, and how long it is kept. Looksmith's answers are in its privacy policy, and the periods for face data are in its biometric data retention policy.

Choosing one

Which kind of try-on should I use?

Use the brand's own AR filter when you are choosing between two shades of one product on a site you are already on. It is free, instant, tied to a real item you can add to a basket, and its live camera mode generally keeps the frames on your device. If it offers a photo-upload mode instead, that is an upload, and the same four questions apply. That answers a narrow question well, and nothing here beats it.

Use generative try-on when the question is bigger than one product: whether a whole look suits you, what a colour does to your face rather than to your lips, or when you want something to keep and compare a week later. Accept that a Looksmith look takes about a minute and does not move.

Use the swatch grid to read finish and texture, then stop, because the face in it is not yours.

For a wider survey of the options that are not digital at all, including testers and samples, see how to try on makeup without buying it.

Can I use Looksmith yet?

Not yet. Looksmith is an iOS app from Mirable Labs, Inc., and it is not released. Coming soon to iOS. The site takes waitlist emails in the meantime. There is more about who builds it, and a longer answer at is Looksmith legit if that is the real question.

What does Looksmith cost?

The first six Looksmith looks are free, granted at onboarding, and after that Looksmith uses credits bought in packs. Looksmith has no subscription and is not going to add one. Mirable Labs sets pricing at launch, so there is no number to print here yet.

What to do today

If what you need today is a shade decision on a product you are already looking at, do not wait for Looksmith. Open the brand's own AR filter. It is right there, and it will answer that question better than a rendered look would.