BOISE, Idaho — If you've ever worn makeup you know how difficult it can be to find the perfect foundation color, but one local company is making it easier with color-matching technology.
- Boldhue is a cosmetic technology company that creates custom-made foundation by scanning your skin.
- Rachel Wilson and Karin Layton are co-founders of the company. Layton combined her experience as an engineer and color theorist when she had trouble finding the right shade of foundation.
- The machine goes on sale this fall, and they are taking pre-orders online.
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story.)
If you've ever worn makeup you know the woes of finding that right foundation color, but one company has made it easier for you to find your match.
I'm your neighborhood reporter Jessica Davis talking to the co-founder of Boldhue and how they're making their mark in the makeup industry.
"We are a beauty tech company founded on inclusivity where we have a device that scans a scan and gives you matched foundation instantly on demand," Rachel Wilson, co-founder.
Boldhue is a technology company that makes your foundation shade on-the-spot. Rachel Wilson says her co-founder Karin Layton is a color theorist and engineer, and she started the idea, after not having a foundation that matches her skin tone.
"One day she was getting ready for work she bought another $50 foundation, that didn't match her skin, she just threw her arms up and was like, 'wow, why can't I have matched foundation,' so she took engineering and color theory and morphed this idea. That was over five years ago, and we've been building ever since."
So how does it work?
"It's a wand that comes it scans your skin in three locations," Wilson explained. "So we scan it on your forehead, neck and chest."
Wilson continues, "Once you put the wand right back into the device, on our app it's going to populate a color capture for you for your skin tone."
Once you scan your skin, the machine will take the undertones of your skin color., using blues, reds, yellows, and whites to create your custom foundation.
"It decides how many droplets equate to you and then from there you can accept exactly what you see in front of you; from there, you can dial up or dial down shades."
"Once you accept the reading the system kicks on and it spits out kind of like a Keurig with one cup of coffee, it spits out roughly a weeks' worth of foundation," Wilson says.
The machine goes on sale this fall, as of now you can pre-order online. Throughout this year the Boldhue will be traveling the country introducing their machine to newcomers and breaking into the makeup world.
"We've gone through 11 prototyping series and every leg of the race it was test, test, test so that meant having focus groups testing different skin tones adjusting our algorithm to get to a point where we feel wildly confident that it will match the entire rainbow," Wilson said.
Boldhue will be at Boise Pride on Saturday, September 14th, they'll be giving away prizes and letting you try the Boldue machine.
