Korean beauty platform Zamface lures young consumers with personalized solutions

[Photo provided by Zamface]

Offering personal colors and personalized beauty solutions can be the key to attracting young consumers, according to Zamface Chief Executive Officer Yoon Jeong-ha.

“Generation Z considers personal color akin to a personality test and chooses an eyeshadow palette and explores new brands based on personal color preference,” Yoon said, during a forum with CEOs in the fashion, beauty, and retail industries organized by Maeil Business Newspaper on Monday.

Personal color refers to the unique color of an individual’s skin tone and is often classified into 18 colors. Focusing on the young people’s interest in personal color, Yoon created Zamface, an application-based beauty platform designed to help consumers select cosmetics that are best compatible with their skin.

“We wanted to create a beauty platform for the young generation, whose primary language is videos,” Yoon said.

Zamface gained popularity with its personalized beauty solutions, allowing users to learn their own skin characteristics and to share experiences with people who have similar skin types. Its augmented reality-based personal color diagnosis service has attracted over 2.2 million users in just one and a half year since its launch, with 98 percent of users belonging to the young consumer group.

Yoon said that consumers actively consider personal color when searching for products. For example, when looking for an eyeshadow palette or lip color, they type in “winter cool” or “spring warm” as keywords.

In fact, 54.4 percent of Korean consumers take personal color into account when purchasing fashion and beauty products. The ratio is 59.6 percent among U.S. consumers and 54.9 percent among Japanese consumers. The search volume for personal color at Zamface also increased by 322 percent between August 2021 and August 2022.

During the forum, Yoon shared some Zamface diagnosis results.

According to the data, the most common skin color among Korean cosmetic users was “autumn warm true,” accounting for 23 percent, followed by “summer cool true” with 21 percent and “spring warm true” with 19 percent.

Zamface recommends personalized content and optimized products based on these personal color tones diagnoses. Yoon said that unlike older generations, young consumers learn about makeup and cosmetics through videos.

Zamface uses deep learning technology to provide optimized beauty solutions, such as a time jump function for videos, face matching that recommends beauty YouTubers based on selfies, and other customized content curation. There are more than 4,400 brands that customers like on Zamface, and 3.6 million products, indicating a wide variety of preferences.

Yoon predicted that the Generation Alpha will emerge as a major customer base in the beauty and fashion market within the next four to five years, given that the age at which people start wearing makeup is getting younger. “Gen Alpha” likes simple and efficient solutions, values hassel-free relationships, and communicates primarily through video.

In line with the trend, Zamface also actively responds to users’ opinions through Instagram, in addition to the provision of beauty information. Currently, Zamface diagnoses each individual‘s skin type by categorizing it into 64 types, and also provides a service that tells you the compatibility of your skin with more than 10,000 skincare products available in the domestic market.

In just six months of its launch, Zamface’s cosmetics matching service has accumulated more than 4 million uses. It also has introduced matching discount deals for some highly recognized products, providing a higher discount rate for a higher matching score. The new sales approach proved highly successful, with products being sold out on the first day of the deal.