Ulta Beauty Enhances AI-Enabled Virtual Try-On Experiences
As part of its growth strategy for 2025 and beyond, Ulta Beauty is beefing up its artificial intelligence tech stack and digital offerings to help personalize the shopper experience and drive discovery and trial.
During the third quarter of fiscal 2024 (ended Nov. 2), the retailer enhanced its suite of virtual try-on and AI-enabled skin and hair analysis experiences with the launch of GlamLab 2.0, which includes a new 3D engine to increase “precision and stability” and shoppable makeup looks as well as a new user interface with sharing capabilities, the retailer said during a Dec. 5 earnings call.
Ulta first launched GlamLab with photo try-on capabilities in 2016, but the feature’s usage surged in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. GlamLab was Ulta’s first generative AI (GenAI) application, and it was developed by its digital innovation team.
The latest GlamLab enhancements were designed to elevate the hair style and color try-on experience by showing near-instant, realistic previews of desired hairstyles based on selfies. Users can take a photo, upload a headshot or use a model’s picture to experiment with different hair colors and styles via Ulta’s mobile app or website.
The experience is powered by tech company NVIDIA’s StyleGAN2 GenAI model, a style-based neural network architecture for generative adversarial networks (GANs), according to a Dec. 19 blog post from NVIDIA. StyleGAN2 uses transfer learning to generate infinite images in a variety of styles.
Hair color try-ons also link to Ulta’s product pages. According to NVIDIA, Ulta has found that people who use the virtual tool are more likely to purchase a product than those who don’t.
“Shoppers need to try out hair and makeup styles before they purchase,” Juan Cardelino, director of the computer vision and digital innovation department at Ulta, said in the blog. “As one of the first cosmetics companies to integrate makeup testers in stores, offering try-ons is part of Ulta Beauty’s DNA — whether in physical or digital retail environments.”
“For our hairstyle try-on use case, we had to license the [StyleGAN2] model for commercial use, retrain it and put guardrails around it to ensure the AI was only modifying pixels related to hair — not distorting any feature of the user’s face,” Cardelino added.
The hair style and color try-on experience relies on NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs in the cloud to run AI inference, which takes around five seconds to compute the first style and about a second each for subsequent styles, per NVIDIA.
Looking ahead, Ulta plans to incorporate virtual trials for additional hair categories, such as wigs, and is exploring how the virtual hairstyle try-ons could be connected to in-store styling services next.
“Stylists could use the tool to show our guests how certain hairstyles will look on them, giving them more confidence to try new looks,” Cardelino said.
“Hair and makeup are playful categories,” he added. “Virtual try-ons are a way to explore options that may be out of a customer’s comfort zone without needing to commit to a physical change.”