Perhaps to the initial dismay of some collaborators, Grace Choi isn’t an idea repeater. 

“I never wish to do the identical thing twice,” said the augmented reality filter creator, who knows the important thing to disrupting the tedium of a typical TikTok scroll through her craft hangs within the balance of functionality and novelty. 

Though Choi has been innovating in the wonder industry for greater than a decade — she debuted the primary 3D makeup printer in 2014 through her company, Mink — it wasn’t until TikTok launched its AR Effect House platform in beta mode in 2021 that she began seriously dabbling in social media filter creation. 

“I believed there just wasn’t quite a platform that was right for it,” said Choi, who previously trialed Meta’s analogous Spark AR program but decided it “wasn’t as conversational as TikTok, which was so creative and interactive — it was a fantastic environment to simply experiment.” 

Fairly than adding to the spate of beauty filters which distort or exaggerate a user’s facial expression, Choi sought to introduce filters with function — “utility filters,” she has since coined them — either by way of their ability to resolve a user quandary, guide makeup application, and so forth. 

Her first filter was prompted by her own personal dilemma: mastering the proper brows. 

Using the mathematical concept of the golden ratio — which conveys the thought of perfect or symmetrical composition — Choi created a filter that maps out how a user can best fill of their eyebrows to suit their facial proportions. One month after its debut, people began catching on. 

“Someone in Mexico used it, after which the filter began swirling around from there,” said Choi, whose inaugural filter has garnered greater than 3 billion views across 281,000-plus posts since its debut 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 soon introduced a blush placement filter in collaboration with Patrick Starr’s One/Size to advertise the launch of a latest blush trio; a bronzer placement filter with Nars Cosmetics, and a gradual slew of others with Dior Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Profit Cosmetics and more — each filter serving as a tool for a particular need. 

“I’ve all the time felt that beauty moments and experiences — particularly things that you just would do in-store like shade or color matching, and even makeup tutorials — may very well be far more personalized and immersive using augmented reality,” said Choi, who most recently collaborated 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 many earliest class of TikTok-viral beauty products. In response to feedback that the product’s shade range didn’t wholly cater to consumers with cool or neutral undertones, though, Kosas unveiled 11 additional shades at the highest of 2024, bringing the whole assortment to 38 shades.

“We were enthusiastic about how we are able to launch a product with a splash and move the conversation beyond, ‘have you ever seen this viral product trending on TikTok?” said Kosas chief marketing officer Adeline Leong. 

The brand tapped six large-scale influencers to get the filter launch off the bottom, and organic adoption was swift; inside two weeks, the filter had amassed 160 million views across roughly 48,000 TikTok videos. Greater than 40 of those videos exceeded 1 million views, a few of which got here from creators with a mere few hundred followers. 

“We saw the filter as an education tool,” Leong said. “TikTok may be such a world of ‘just get the influencer to discuss your product being the very best one,’ and that’s really oversaturated right away; we wish [our consumer] to get right into a Sephora, but we also want to begin 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 wonder community discussing online, facilitating conversation is a key aim of the creative process. 

“TikTok not only provides the technology to create these filters, but additionally the social aspect where you possibly can see someone that appears such as you using the filter, and it gives you this sort of social confirmation of ‘she’s using this filter and she or he looks like me — perhaps I’m actually a cool undertone.’ It creates this community shopping environment,” Choi said. 

Ulta Beauty Collective member and filter creator Zahava Ben-Haim (@makeup2themaxx) also seeks to counterpoint online discourse through her signature randomizer filters, the primary of which was a Rare Beauty blush shade randomizer that she debuted in June 2023. 

“Creators were finding it very hard to interact with PR [mailers]. It could get difficult if you’re receiving such a high volume of product, so I believed, ‘what’s a way for us to interact with the mailer and keep it going?’ because normally you get one video where it’s like, ‘OK, let me do this blush and I’m done,’” said Ben-Haim, who spent years as a cosmetic chemist and sweetness marketer before turning to content creation through 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 out herself in a video that garnered greater than 1 million likes. 

“After we saw the blush randomizer we were like, ‘that is good — why didn’t we predict of this?’” said Ashley Murphy, vp of consumer marketing at Rare Beauty, who then tapped Ben-Haim to create a bracket filter that allowed users to find out their favorite Rare Beauty product, as a part of the brand’s third anniversary celebration that summer. 

“In case you return and watch a few of those [bracket] videos, a few of them are like, ‘oh, that is so hard,’ or persons are sitting there really deliberating for multiple seconds and are engaged with the brand on this, ‘Do I pick the lip oil? Do I pick the blush?’ sort of desert-island situation,” Murphy said. 

Amongst Ben-Haim’s other popular creations are a “Drugstore beauty” randomizer, which chooses the brand an individual must use for every makeup step and spawned a subsequent “Luxury makeup” randomizer; a product rating filter she used to individually rank Ariana Grande’s fragrance collection and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode assortment, and an “Ulta Beauty picks my next buy” filter. 

“You may tell when someone discovers my page, because they’ll use all of the filters in a single week,” said Ben-Haim, who counts 106,000 followers on TikTok and whose 12 filters have amassed greater than 222 million collective views. 

A suggestion from influencer Mikayla Nogueira prompted Ben-Haim to introduce a “Clean beauty” regimen randomizer, and she or he most recently partnered with MAC Cosmetics on a lip shade randomizer, integrated via QR code into the brand’s Macximal Silky Matte Lipstick mailer celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its founding this 12 months. 

“I do think those big, ‘wow’ beauty mailers are still relevant — it’s obvious brands need to get our attention, I just need to be certain that people aren’t missing the purpose of interacting and twiddling with the product, versus a brand throwing them a box and hoping for a review,” Ben-Haim said. 

In other cases, the advantage of functional filters lies of their ability to amplify a brand without entailing the sort of overt promoting that TikTok users are, in any case, weary of.

For instance, neither Choi’s Kosas undertone filter or her “Match Stix Snatch” Fenty Beauty contour filter feature any mention of their respective affiliated brand — only subtle nods to their signature color schemes. 

“You need to have as many individuals as possible to make use of the filter, so the less branded it’s, the higher,” said Choi, who does be certain that to verbally name brand collaborators in any filter kickoff video. “TikTok is an echo chamber, so if I say ‘this filter by Fenty Beauty,’ the following person goes to do the identical — you don’t need those hyper-branded elements.”

Though nearly all of Choi’s beauty filters to this point have been maps — or filters which guide product placement indirectly — the undertone-finder marks the beginning of the following leg of her creation journey, during which she anticipates maps won’t be the one or the very best strategy to engage consumers through utility filters. 

“That is tech and that is beauty — two spaces that consistently evolve and that customers consistently get fatigued by,” she said. “Possibly it was maps last 12 months, or undertones this 12 months — they’re totally different disciplines, however the common thread is that you just’re solving an issue for a customer in beauty.”