AI

Ulta Beauty taps Glamlab app for virtual hairstyle experience

Image: Courtesy of Ulta Beauty/NVIDIA.

December 27, 2024

Ulta Beauty is using an AI app, Glamlab Hair Try On, to provide shoppers a virtual hair style experience before committing to a change in hair style or color.

The Glamlab Hair Try On is a digital experience that lets users take a photo, upload a head shot or use a model's picture to experiment with different hair colors and styles, according to a Nvidia blog. It is powered by the Nvidia StyleGAN2 generative AI model.

Ulta Beauty, which has more than 1,400 stores across the U.S., has found shoppers 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 Beauty, stated in the blog post. "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."

To build its AI pipeline, the Ulta Beauty team turned to StyleGAN2, a style-based neural network architecture for generative adversarial networks, aka GANs. StyleGAN2, developed by NVIDIA Research, uses transfer learning to generate infinite images in a variety of styles.

"StyleGAN2 is one of the most well-regarded models in the tech community, and, since the source code was available for experimentation, it was the right choice for our application," Cardelino said in the blog. "For our hairstyle try-on use case, we had to license the 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."

The experience is available on the Ulta Beauty website and mobile app.

The company plans to incorporate virtual trials for additional hair categories like wigs and is exploring how the virtual hairstyle try-ons could be connected to in-store styling services.