L’Oréal teams up with Snap for video-call beauty filters

L’Oréal and Snap created augmented reality camera filters for people to experiment with hair and makeup looks on video calls.

The eight beauty filters were designed for Snap’s free desktop application, Snap Camera, and promote brands including Garnier, Lancôme, L’Oréal Paris, and Maybelline.

Users with Windows or Apple computers can apply the AR filters to alter their hair and face as it appears on screen during live streams and video chats within Snap’s desktop platform. And Snap Camera is compatible with Zoom and Google Hangouts, meaning the filters can be applied by users making conference calls on those platforms, too.

This is the first branded beauty experience created for Snap’s desktop platform, which has experienced a 30-fold increase in daily downloads since the Covid-19 lockdown forced people to embrace video calling.

The filters are an opportunity for L’Oréal to stand out in a competitor-free space at a time when cosmetics brands are taking a sales hit, in the short term at least.

Data from McKinsey shows that in China, the first country to be hit by the coronavirus, beauty sales in February fell by up to 80% compared with the previous year, but in March the year-on-year decline was just 20%.

As such, L’Oreal is wise to grasp any opportunity to raise brand awareness and adapt to the changing circumstances of its customers.

The company has long been wise to AR’s potential to boost product discoverability. When ecommerce sales rose 49% in the first half of 2019, L’Oréal gave partial credit to the virtual try-on technology provided by Modiface, the tech startup it acquired a year earlier.

Brand: L’Oréal

Source: Contagious I/O