Is Beauty in the Eye of the AI Prompter?

This is an excerpt from MEGA Dec-Jan 2025 Beauty Op-Ed

Few things are more in our nature than the anticipatory anxiety for the future. The future, after all, never announces its arrival; instead, it seeps in quietly, slowly, until it streams down all at once. Permanence fleets. Familiarity fades. And in its wake, we are left to pause and confront the truth: Change does not always push us forward. There are times when change pulls us to look inward, asking us to sit in between what once was and what is yet to come.

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I have been returning to the same thought for some time now: Is this it? Are we already living in the future? Weeks of work can now be compressed into a day. Ideas are built in an hour. Routines are hyper-personalized in seconds. What once demanded patience, process, and persistence can now be completed in an instant. Everything is easier. Everything is faster. Everything is AI. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been slowly transforming our world since its inception. Its groundwork, laid as early as the 1950s, paved the way for the technological advancements we now experience through our smartphones, including advanced security features, battery optimization, and voice assistants, to name a few. Time stokes this further. Our cultural preoccupation with Artificial Intelligence has waned, becoming a mechanizing force in how we live today. 

Beauty, of course, has followed a similar path. 

Retailers work overtime to chase the future of beauty. Artificial Intelligence (AI), paired with Augmented Reality (AR), helped make that vision tangible through an immersive beauty simulator. Compared to social media filters, this was far more intentional. It introduced us to the first generation of virtual try-ons, digitally overlaying makeup, hairstyles, or skincare effects projected in real-time onto our faces through smart devices. Only a handful of companies offered this feature in-store or online. Until the pandemic accelerated everything.

In the absence of human touch, technology became a bridge to the physical gap: screens became our mirrors, data our beauty advisors, and digital adaptation a critical touchpoint in the consumer journey. Artificial Intelligence was no longer a supplementary tool. It became central in recreating the beauty experience we once sought outside. 

The headlines were true. The pandemic did change our relationship with beauty. Or more precisely, our growing dependency on Artificial Intelligence did.

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Read more about how Artificial Intelligence is changing our relationship with beauty in MEGA’s Dec-Jan 2025 issue, now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.

Art: TROY NONATO

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Is Beauty in the Eye of the AI Prompter?
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