This time it’s personal;
Is personalisation the result of a lazy man’s game?
I was fortunate enough to be invited to an event the other week; Beauty Innovation Talks, hosted by lifestyle and tech magazine Scandinavian MIND and personalised AI and AR beauty platform Revieve. The idea was to gather innovators, retail experts, and digital specialists from the Nordic beauty industry to discuss how to use new technologies to create success, since new technologies are influencing all parts of the beauty industry — from manufacturing and distribution to customer relations and retail. As I sat in my chair during one of the panel talks, I couldn’t help but find it fascinating to not only listen to upcoming trends and future gazing, but also ponder on the opposite side of this extremely forward-thinking space.
If personalization is a hygiene factor for brands in 2023, this also means we all must rely more and more on technology to make sure the brands and manufactures can cope with this rising demand. Pretty much a no brainer, right? WRONG. This is, in my opinion, where it gets messy. Cause as much as I believe that technology is the future and that it’s inevitable to move forward within this space, I can’t stop myself from acknowledging the feeling of a loss of agency, with technology taking me down a path I didn’t necessarily choose.
And no, I’m not trying to do a ‘Will Smith in I Robot’ here, not at all. But imagine you need a brand-new skincare routine. You do some googling, ask some friends for recommendations and suddenly you’ll most likely find yourself on some sort of website, taking some kind of test, answering a handful of set questions about your skin condition, your routines, age, gender etc, etc. You probably don’t overthink the questions or even reflect as much as you should, but rather simply tick the answers closest to your actual condition to then be given “your personalised results”. But how can it truly be personalized if we are all asked the same questions and unable to provide exact answers? Yes, it might steer me in a clearer direction of what I need, but quantitative data can only take us so far. Can my perfect skincare routine really be designed by an algorithm which can never fully understand my needs? When thinking of something as personal and even changeable as our skin, can we ever get to a truly personal routine when so much nuance is potentially missing?
This is just me speculating here, but I think that most of us has this internal conflict of both loving and hating the fact that the digital world has forced its way closer and closer to our purest selves. It’s no longer just a targeted social media ad, it’s them trying to analyze us, our skin issues, our mental health, our actions, reactions, and deepest thoughts. And once they’ve gathered all your information, they give you a recommendation that’s supposedly only yours but that you know is based on the predictive patterns of an algorithm.
It’s a reality check of the fact that we are not as special as we once thought we we’re. After being told that every single one of us is unique, we are now suddenly being categorised by technology — the proof being that there is a set collection of answers for someone like you, me and probably thousands of others. We are not as different as we thought we were, fact is that there are tons of people like us, a fact technology is all too happy to remind us. Still, we accept it. We take the recommendations, buy the products and hope for the best. Why is that? Well, for me it all leads up to one singular question; are we really craving personalization or are we blindly relying on technology to give us the answer.
When it comes to something as personal as skincare, I believe we need to strike a balance. There is nothing wrong with using tools to get yourself started, I would even claim it’s beneficial. However, you shouldn’t forget to use your own deliberation and judgement to design — in this case a skin care routine — that is truly made for your skin and your skin only.
