These skincare apps will make you feel like a beauty expert

Ever find yourself standing at a beauty counter, feeling intimidated and confused – which product does what, exactly? And what works best for your skin? There’s a solution: Smartphone apps that help you navigate the wide array of skincare in the market.

These diagnose your skin issues, educate you on ingredients that may work for your skin, recommend products, and dole out advice. The newest one is Picky, designed to simplify skincare science so it’s easier to understand.

Developed by a Singapore-South Korean pair of skincare enthusiasts in the land of K-beauty, it started when co-founders Rachel Lee and Lee Ji-hong wanted to make K-skincare more accessible to an international audience.

“There was a lack of information about these products…and there was no go-to platform for comprehensive ingredient information in English,” says Rachel Lee, Picky’s Singapore half.

“We live in a world where we get an influx of marketing messages, endorsements and advertisements every day. So it becomes increasingly difficult for even savvy skincare enthusiasts to navigate through the noise and to evaluate products based on their core functions – ingredient formulae.”

Picky, which was launched in March 2020, allows users to check a product’s compatibility with their skin type, using an ingredient- based evaluation of the formula – so far, it’s garnered 5,000 downloads and 3,300 registered users.

Picky isn’t the only skincare app; there are others, although they’re not available to Singapore users.

What’s accessible – and useful – are other apps like Trove and Ingred. The former analyses your selfie to give you a lowdown on the state of your skin, so you can zoom in on your main concerns and track your skin’s progress when you use new products.

Ingred gives you information about ingredients (in both cosmetics and food products) so you can understand what’s going onto your skin and into your body.

1. Troveskin

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What is it: Uses AI (artificial intelligence) to analyse your skin concerns in order to give you skincare recommendations. Also helps you track your skin’s progress when you start on a new routine.

Good for: Skincare newbies

How it works: You upload a selfie, then take a quiz to share your skin concerns. The app analyses your spots, pores, texture and wrinkles, then gives your skin an overall score out of 100, and a skin age.

Each skin concern is also individually scored using a good, very good, average or below average ranking. It also tells you the key concerns to focus on.

The app offers some skincare routine recommendations and personalised skincare articles (if you have acne, it might suggest articles on how to keep skin clean and control excess sebum). It also encourages you to take a daily selfie to chart your skin’s progress and changes over time.

You can also include personal lifestyle habits in your profile, such as the amount of sleep and exercise.

Get it from: Apple App Store and Google Play

2. Picky

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What is it: Analyses your skin type, and custom-recommends skincare ingredients and products to you.

Good for: Both skincare newbies and beauty enthusiasts

How it works: You first take a 14-question Skin Type Analyzer quiz. The quiz was crafted with the help of Korean dermatologists, including the company’s in-house dermatologist, Claudia Christine. She’s a well-known influencer (@funskincare) and dermatologist who specialises in K-beauty skincare science.

Using your answers, the app categorises your skin into one of four types: 1. Oily and Sensitive 2. Dry and Sensitive 3. Oily and Resilient and 4. Dry and Resilient. Lee says they are also looking to include a new “normal/combination” skin type to the app.

Next, using its huge database – 3,960 Korean, Singapore and international brands, and over 30,000 products and growing – the app analyses the key ingredients in each product, and assesses how compatible they are with your skin. These are then recommended to you.

Besides ingredient-to-skin compatibility, you can also filter product recommendations via ingredients, skincare concerns and even attributes (which include being cruelty-free, vegan, pregnancy-friendly and eczema-safe).

Come this month, users can look forward to a new function that analyses the products you currently use, so you can see if the different ones work well together. In the pipeline for the year end: click-to-buy options.

Get it from: Apple App Store; targeted to launch on Google Play at the end of the year

3. Ingred

What is it: An app that reads the ingredients in both skincare and food products, and lets you know what’s safe or toxic. Especially useful if you’re allergic to certain ingredients and need to avoid them.

Good for: Clean-beauty enthusiasts

How it works: Just take a photo of the product’s ingredient list, and the app will analyse and pull up the information it has. How comprehensive the ingredient information is depends on what’s stored in the app’s database – and it can be limited.

For instance, we ran a search on a sunscreen from a popular brand. What came back was a listing of slightly more than half of the ingredients in the formula. And one of the ingredients, glycerin, focused on its use in food, rather than in cosmetics.

We recommend using Ingred as a starting point to learn more about what’s in your skincare, but you still have to do your own research after that – so that you can form a more comprehensive impression of the product and become more aware of controversial ingredients.

Get it from: Apple App Store and Google Play

This article was first published in Her World Online.