Unotone
An AI beauty assistant. Detect your skin tone and undertone from a photo, find makeup that truly matches, and ask a community for advice.
Why
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, buying foundation meant choosing a shade online without trying it in a shop. My wife described the result: order a few samples, keep the one that works, and throw away the rest. Getting the color wrong cost money and created waste before the product was even used.
I started Unotone in 2021 to see whether a phone camera could help make that choice. The first version analyzed a photo, suggested skin tone samples, and let you choose the closest one before looking for matching foundations. It was one more attempt to stop waste, built around a problem at home.
In 2024, cheaper image-capable LLMs opened another possibility: use AI for skin tone detection and community discussions at a cost a side project could sustain. I rolled it out to real users, processing around 2,000 submissions in the first few weeks. Affordability made the experiment practical; consistent output remained a challenge.
How
- Build your beauty profile: take or upload a photo for AI-assisted skin tone and undertone analysis.
- Find a closer match: explore foundations for your tone and alternatives to products you already use.
- Experiment with colors: use and create palettes to explore your undertone and the shades you like.
- Find products and advice: browse the marketplace, ask the community, and share what worked for you.
The aim is to make the next purchase less of a guessing game. Photo analysis gives you a starting point; product comparisons and other people’s experience help you decide what to try.
Unotone launched on iOS and Android in March 2022 and remains available on both. What began as a foundation-matching tool has grown into a beauty companion, still built around the same question: can we choose better and throw away less?
