FUTURE STORIES IS a monthly podcast from TheJournal.ie and Volkswagen. This month, we’re looking ahead to the future of beauty – and what doing your makeup could look like in ten, twenty or fifty years.
Tracy Tough hears from the people whose job it is to predict the beauty trends we’ll all be following in years to come.
Plus, she meets the Taiwanese team behind HiMirror, a voice-activated smart mirror enabled with skin analysis tech. And she goes to the trenches, speaking to millennials as they prep their hair and makeup for a night on the town.
Finding new skincare is just something that I enjoy doing, it’s like reading the back of a book and figuring out if you’re going to like the story.
Clara Cullen is a self-confessed skincare addict, whose bathroom shelf currently contains “about 27″ products – all of which she’ll use at some stage from day to day, she tells Tracy Tough in the latest episode of Future Stories.
Skincare and cosmetics are a big-money game. Unlike many other industries, beauty consumers roundly reject one-size-fits-all solutions. If you want your skin to look good, you’ll need to buy the right serum, the right cleanser, the right moisturiser – and that’s before you’ve even put makeup on.
Michael Nolte is the creative director of Beautystreams, a France-based company that forecasts future beauty trends and customer needs, working behind-the-scenes with L’Oréál, MAC, Sephora and more.
What’ll be the best-selling lipstick shade in 2020? What sort of packaging will appeal to a customer in 2021? Those are the sorts of questions the teams at Beautystreams answer daily, working with customer focus groups and industry experts – everyone from chefs to biotechnologists to clothes designers. He explains how it works:
We ask very large questions, like ‘Where is the world heading?’ and ‘What do you see in your field?’ and then we criss-cross that information and identify different trends that we think will be important in the upcoming two to three years.
Michael points to “blue-sky ideas” like self regenerating lipsticks, and more accessible developments like wearables, smart mirrors and other devices.
What we see for sure is that technology will be integrated more into the body, and the lines will blur between our devices and ourselves.
Hear more on Future Stories. The new episode is live right now:
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Listen to it on Soundcloud here. Or click-through to be taken to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audioboom.
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