The Keurig For Makeup, This New Beauty Device Will Replace Your Foundation

Finding your perfect foundation match can be a struggle, to say the least. You can spend hours swatching at the makeup counter only to realize you picked the wrong shade when you’re outside in natural daylight. And sometimes those AI quizzes give you the wrong answer. Just when you’ve found your match, you get a tan and have to start all over. If you had one makeup wish, wouldn’t it be to have the exact right foundation at your fingertips? BoldHue is making that dream come true.

Essentially the Keurig of makeup, the first-of-its-kind smart device creates a custom foundation in exactly one minute at the touch of a button, mixing colorants to make a bespoke shade. “We’ve been working on this for five years and the story is very much about inclusivity,” says BoldHue Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Wilson. “Ever since I was a little girl, I never felt included. I’d look up to a billboard and it told me that if I didn’t look or act a certain way, that I’m not really a part of it. As I got older and talked to a lot of makeup wearers, that story was heard over and over and over.”

Wilson co-founded the beauty technology company with Karin Layton, CTO, a former aerospace engineer who is also a painter and color theorist. “She bought a $50 bottle of foundation, went to get ready for work and it didn’t match her skin,” Wilson says. “She had the aha moment, engineering color theory, but when we talked about from my perspective, that emotional experience, it was the same for her. She was like, ‘I’m an introvert, I’m kind of a nerd and I also don’t feel that I’m included.’ That linked us together in an interesting way. I’m a two-time founder and when she came to me with this idea and showed me what she created—it was a prototype that had crazy wires running through it—my mind exploded. I was like, before we decide that we’re going to take this to market, because I’ve taken a product to market and it’s not easy, we’re going to do something that no one has done before. Let’s be very methodical. Let’s ask the right questions, take a deep dive and have the conversations.”

Those conversations revealed that Wilson and Layton weren’t alone. “It was story after story that reverberated back to me as the little girl of just not feeling included, no matter what part of the rainbow you are a part of,” Wilson says. They linked up with experts and advisors and did plenty of market research. “We had such a resounding yes all the way from Gen Z to Baby Boomers to even heterosexual men who didn’t feel like they could walk into a heavily skewed women’s store. The right thing to do is not cut corners and stay true to inclusivity through and through.”

Shade matching became their top priority, which is evident when you use the device. First, you download the app and create an account and profile. Once your phone is connected to the device via Bluetooth, you can start a scan. It’s connected to a wand that that houses BoldHue’s proprietary algorithm. The wand is held up to three points: The forehead, chin and underneath the neck, to find an aggregate of your skin tone because people are not one flat color—we tend to get more sun on our forehead and little on our neck. Once each measurement is taken, the wand both vibrates and beeps to inform those hard of hearing it is complete. Next, pop in a sustainable, reusable glass jar and the device will make about a week’s worth of foundation. It adds the exact right colors into the jar, then you blend it with a custom mixing spatula that BoldHue partnered with Beautyblender on to create. “Imagine you’re getting ready for work,” Wilson says. “You scan your skin, hop in the shower and it’s ready for you when you’re out.” Your shade can be saved in the app so that you don’t need to scan every time.

Designed to be user-friendly, the app essentially doubles as a tutorial and walks you through the entire process. “The first time you do it, pay attention to the videos and the education behind it,” Wilson says. “And be very thorough with the mixing because we want to be sure that we don’t get any striations of color. I had my 73-year-old mother do it start to finish and she said it’s pretty easy.”

The device can output millions of foundation shades in one minute. “It shouldn’t be a privilege or a luxury to find something that feels so home,” says Celebrity Makeup Artist and BoldHue Artistic Director Sir John. “Beauty is also so emotional. Beauty is a feeling, right? We don’t always feel like we’re at a brand’s idea from inception. We feel like we’re an afterthought in so many ways. I knew that the technology was great, but from an emotional standpoint, this actually make us feel like we are all in the same room. We’re all going to the same party.”

The back of the device houses everything needed to create the foundation, including the preservative system, emulsions and pigments. “We use five pigments, which is rare,” Wilson says. “Brands with the benchmark in the 60-shade line are going to be using three to four. Blue is very important for us to reach the rainbow. Blue gets your really deep, rich caramels and mochas. That has to do with all the color theory background.” The device will keep track of the cartridge levels as you use it and notify you when they need to be reordered, which can be done with the click of a button. On average, people will need to replace one to two cartridges per month, which totals to around $35 per month. (The device is $295.) By selling the cartridges individually, it saves consumers money by not having to buy a full set and cuts down on waste.

To ensure BoldHue was delivering exactly what customers wanted, they went on social media very early to see what it would take to solve the pain points of foundation. “We didn’t realize that that adoption rate would be so high, but we’ve gone viral over 15 times, with 150 million impressions,” Wilson says. “Organically, it was zero ad spend. That showed us that people cared about the process, and so we said let’s include them in what it looks like. Thousands of people chose this color of the device. They chose the color of the box.” The device is slightly larger than a water bottle so that it can easily fit in people’s homes.

Nailing the foundation formula was another hurdle. A clean formula was a requirement, as well as being vegan and cruelty-free. Skin-forward ingredients were a must, so it contains snow mushroom for hydration and rice bran for luminosity, as well as glycerin, vegan squalane and vitamin E for hydration. “We found a lab that was willing to think outside the box, because we were met with a lot of ‘this is impossible,’” Wilson says. “We finally partnered with a lab that is one of the leaders in foundation with brands that we already know and love. It took us years and we’ve proven that we can do the impossible.”