Beauty, health, and wellness have become intertwined, as brands strive to cater to increasingly educated consumers' evolving needs, with a plethora of buzzy new brands launching every month. Behind the scenes of many of the most successful brands are beauty tech partners powering the evolution of personalization, connectivity, and transparency, changing how consumers discover, try, and buy products and services. We live in a time when customers not only expect brands to understand their wants and needs, but anticipate and exceed them.
These technology companies operating in the background of beauty's biggest companies have quietly scaled well beyond the value of many of the venture-backed brands they serve. Taiwan's Perfect Corp. became a public company through a $1 billion SPAC deal in 2022, trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and Chinese tech company Meitu's 2016 public offering in Hong Kong valued the business at $4.6 billion.
Over the last decade, we've experienced an acceleration of personalization across categories driven by advancements in technology and digitalization that have made it widely available. According to a research report by InsightAce Analytic, the global Next-Generation Personalized Beauty market was valued at $41.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $143.6 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 15.3% during the forecast period of 2022-2030.
Responding to evolving consumer perceptions and perpetually shifting market conditions, the ability to leverage customer data at a granular level provides a competitive advantage, as brands continue looking for ways to improve the customer experience through marketing that is more digital, targeted, precise, and personalized, creating opportunities for new technologies.
Skin Dossier is a new entrant to the tech personalization universe, emerging out of stealth mode with a next-generation recommendation engine for skincare, supplements, aesthetics, and dermatology that takes its cue from precision medicine to deliver an integrative personalization ecosystem. Their offering targets customers with relevant and contextualized product and service suggestions.
"Personalization isn’t new anymore, and soon consumers will see through the gimmicks and demand accuracy. Skin Dossier's multiple diagnostics yield greater accuracy beyond the industry standard of a quiz and a single diagnostic. Precision medicine doesn’t just rely on one diagnostic or just a quiz. It’s time we move past that in skincare too," says Skin Dossier founder Sindhya Valloppillil.
Valloppillil believes imaging alone is not enough because it only captures a snapshot of a person's skin at that moment without answering why it's in that condition. Without insight into a person's biology, lifestyle, and environment, the result of using these tools is an inherently reactive diagnostic approach.
Skin Dossier is described as a beauty health advisor and recommendation engine using a holistic multi-prong diagnostic approach that leverages longitudinal, dynamic, and bio-rich data that delivers predictive personalization. In six minutes, the platform provides predictive personalization using proprietary IP. The first step uses a lifestyle quiz, 3D patented hyperspectral facial imaging with a smartphone. Step two of the process syncs geolocation, health apps, DNA data, and optional blood test data. The platform output is a personalized Skin Dossier Report and recommendations.
The group has also amassed what they claim to be the largest dynamic database for skin health that contains more traits, biomarkers and ingredients than what is currently available. The ingredient database is expansive going beyond traditional western ingredients to include those from Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda.
A seasoned team founded the start-up with diverse disciplines, including CEO and beauty industry veteran Sinhya Valloppillil, CTO Raj Chhibber, a physicist and leader in skin diagnostics for dermatology, and Chief Science Officer Dr. Arul Prakasam Peter, PhD, who has 20+ years as a bioinformatics specialist with an emphasis in genomics.
The Skin Dossier platform claims to increase conversion, order size, and retention for its SAAS partners. Valloppillil shared, "Long term, our proprietary data is the bridge that extends into healthcare, and our platform can help diagnose, treat, and prevent with holistic healthcare assessments."
The company is in active conversations with retail, brand, and medspa partners for their scalable, plug-and-play enterprise solution that creates personalized omnichannel experiences meeting consumers where they are at—demanding to be treated as individuals.
