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NYX Beauty Bestie AI Tool [2025]
Client: NYX Professional Makeup

Led design, UX, and creative direction for NYX Professional Makeup Beauty Bestie, an AI-powered AR beauty companion built to make professional makeup artistry personal, intelligent, and accessible. Anchored by two hero experiences, Find Your Colors, which matched users to shades tailored to their unique palette, and AI Look Recommendations, which generated personalized looks based on where they were going, how they wanted to feel, and their evolving preferences, the experience redefined beauty discovery as playful, adaptive, and deeply personalized.

Executive Creative Director:
Resh Sidhu

Senior Business Manager:
Ben Feuerstein

Design Lead:
Zara Mahmood

Lead Copywriter:
Enoch Lui

Head of Production:
Andrew Seleznov, Elai Plathukin

Executive Producer:
Taylor Donaldson

Director of Film and Photography:
Brent Barbano, Tammy Santos

Creative Partners:
Subtropic Studios

Democratizing pro makeup artistry through AI + AR:
NYX wanted to make expert beauty advice feel personal, accessible, and always available. We built Beauty Bestie—an AI-powered AR companion that helps users discover shades, learn looks, and shop with confidence.

By blending conversational AI, personalized recommendations, and immersive AR try-on, the experience transformed beauty shopping from transactional commerce into guided discovery.

Challenge:
For many consumers, makeup is overwhelming:

Finding the right shades is difficult
Product discovery feels transactional
Professional advice can feel intimidating or inaccessible

The opportunity was to create a product experience that made expert beauty guidance feel approachable, playful, and personalized.

Insight:
People don’t want more beauty products. They want confidence.
The best beauty advisor feels personal, knowledgeable, playful, judgment free, and instantly available.

This became our guiding principle:
Make expert beauty feel like a best friend in your pocket.

But confidence in beauty starts with answering two simple questions:

What suits me?
How will it actually look on me?

Many users struggle to know which colors complement their features. Others hesitate to try new looks without seeing them first.

This insight led us to create two core experiences:

Find My Colors helps users discover the tones and shades that naturally work best for them.

AI Makeup Looks lets users instantly preview personalized makeup looks on their own face, making experimentation easy, playful, and risk free.

Together, these experiences remove guesswork and give users something more valuable:
clarity, confidence, and the freedom to explore beauty on their own terms.

Find My Colors
AI Makeup Looks

Design Approach:
We designed Beauty Bestie as an intelligent AR companion, balancing utility with delight.

The experience was intentionally Gen Z coded in its aesthetic, rooted in the bold, vibrant, and unapologetic spirit of NYX Professional Makeup. We leaned into a playful visual world inspired by aura colors, creating a palette that felt energetic, expressive, and unmistakably ownable.

Our core color system centered around white, lavender, electric blue, and chartreuse, bringing a fresh, high contrast vibrancy that felt youthful, premium, and digitally native.

The visual language combined:

• elevated beauty imagery
• warm conversational AI
• premium motion
• seamless AR try on
• intuitive product discovery flows
• bold color and expressive energy

The result was an experience that felt closer to luxury editorial meets playful digital culture than traditional ecommerce.

Key Product Moments:

Find Your Colors
Personalized shade matching built around skin tone and undertone discovery.

AI Look Recommendations
Context-aware makeup recommendations based on plans, mood, or occasion.

Try Before You Buy
Real-time AR application that removes purchase hesitation.

Beauty Bestie quickly became one of the most impactful beauty experiences on Snap.

240M+ reach
70% uplift in new brand buyers
84% repeat engagement

Multiple industry awards:

Gold in Creative Innovation at The Drum Awards
Gold in Beauty at the Shorty Awards
Nominee AI, Metaverse & Virtual Best Partnerships Webbys