LANEIGE's Beauty Mirror, the first ever virtual makeup application in Korea, is really hitting the big time. Beauty Mirror recognizes the user's face, expression and movement in real time using wearable technology to create a makeup look in 3D. Its mirror feature makes the look more realistic, while allowing users to post the results on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and buy the products they used through the LANEIGE online mall. For this article, we discussed the new possibilities of the beauty market with Claire Jin, who led the development of brilliant Beauty Mirror using digital technologies.

LANEIGE's slogan is "Unleashing the sparkling beauty in you". It's our mission to enhance outer beauty and find the charm and beauty within every woman. Beauty Mirror began with a single thought: how could we provide a whole new in-store experience that would increase customer convenience? More than anything, we wanted to solve problems. For example, customers often refuse to test makeup products because they seem to be unhygienic and there are only a few colors of lipstick samples. Digital devices are a kind of toy that the young generation – or digital natives – have grown up with. That's why we decided to implement a virtual makeup application using the digital mirror.

There have been several virtual makeup apps developed by global beauty companies, but all of them failed to win favor with Asian women. They were designed for Caucasian women with well-defined features, yet such makeup typically seemed unnatural and over the top for Asians. We have focused above all on developing technology to create much more natural makeup for Asian women. We made sure our app could play well on the Android platform as well as the iOS platform because in Asia, Android holds more than half of the mobile market.

We worked with ModiFace, the leading Canadian provider of the digital mirror, because there were no companies in Korea who could provide the digital mirror solution. And it wasn't easy. It took twice as much time to communicate with them because of the time difference and it was often difficult to let people not engaged in the beauty industry know about the specific colors and textures of our products. They even said that they could not elaborate the technology to the level we wanted when developing Android version. It was difficult because it was something that's never been done before. But, all members of our team took great pride in breaking fresh ground. And after much discussion and many attempts, we successfully implemented the technology and felt justifiably rewarded.

I saw the future of the beauty industry. I was able to expand the scope of my thinking as to what are needed to be beautiful, rather than merely thinking about what products to develop and how to promote them. I also learned that a fun element is so important to the beauty experience. That's because everyone can be more beautiful when they have fun and enjoy themselves pampering and doing makeup.

We will add various features to make Beauty Mirror more appealing to customers. One of them will be push notifications to inform Beauty Mirror users about events and promotions hosted by LANEIGE and the latest news about LANEIGE as well. Plus, the location-based feature will be added to give information about nearby stores when users come within a certain distance. This will introduce a new virtual makeup service to show users how they would look when they do the same makeup as LANEIGE's models Song Hye-kyo and Lee Sung-kyung. There will also be an "ask" option so that they can ask their friends to buy the products they picked. We'd like to ask for your support as Beauty Mirror goes through fun and innovative changes.