Cosmetics giant Lancôme just Starbucks’ed our makeup routine and we are thoroughly shooketh. In the same way that the coffee conglomerate can give you a customized beverage tailored exactly to your specifications (heaven forbid anything but oat milk comes in contact with our nitro cold brew), Lancôme can now give you one of the most essential items in a makeup toolkit – a bespoke foundation formula that’s created just for you. It’s all done through a tech-savvy process that assesses and mimics a person’s exact skin tone and then custom-blends your foundation on the spot in a sleek, Apple-esque white robot mixer. We were invited to a lavish suite at the Faena Miami Beach to test out the process (and eat many fancy yogurt parfaits in the process; media junkets make us hungry).
Called Le Teint Particulier Custom Made Foundation, the process is painless and takes around 30 minutes from start to finish. First, it involves a brief Q&A about your skincare needs before a scientific scan of your skin is conducted. That data is then processed through a fancy algorithm (we’d like to think anything involving our pore size requires a lot of fancy number crunching) which creates a recipe that is then fed into a robot that mixes your custom color before your very eyes.
With 8,000 shade options, three levels of coverage and a total of 72,000 formulation combinations, there’s very little chance of not finding the right shade.
Once it’s mixed, a Lancôme makeup specialist will test the product on your skin to make sure it’s a match, and can make adjustments if needed. The extent to which you can tweak the product is absolutely brilliant: you can add more coverage, or make the formula lighter, darker, warmer or cooler – all after trying it on. This is witchcraft.
All this beauty jet fuel gets packaged in an elegant white bottle labeled with your name and foundation ID (a set of numbers that can be used to re-create your foundation) and comes in an adorable white box lined with velvet. And your data and profile are saved inside the Lancôme system so refills are easy.
The result is a luxurious, semi-matte but illuminated complexion that makes you feel like Beyoncé. Want to get it done yourself? The process is now available at Nordstrom at Shops of Merrick Park. A one-ounce bottle retails for $88.