Will Amazon be your next hairdresser?

After opening its own bricks and mortar bookstore in New York, Jeff Bezos’s company has announced the opening of its own hair salon in London. An unexpected project that should allow it to boost its prowess in “beauty tech.”

For almost 30 years, the American e-commerce giant has been able to adapt its offer to many of our needs, whether you want to add a new book to your library, buy a new connected accessory or pick up a few grocery essentials on your way home and you don’t have your wallet with you.

And soon Amazon will help you take care of your hair, too. On its Day One blog, Jeff Bezos’s company revealed that a 150-square-meter hair salon will soon open in East London.

A high-tech establishment equipped with mirrors that will show customers what they would look like with a different hair color or a new cut thanks to augmented reality.

Amazon Salon also promises to provide Londoners with “some of the best technology, hair care products and stylists in the industry.”

Using point-and-learn technology, customers will be able to point their smartphones at any product in the salon to get information about its ingredients, and they’ll also have the option to buy it directly from Amazon’s UK site through a QR code.

The e-commerce giant, however, will leave hair coloring and other styling services to the professionals from Neville Hair & Beauty, an independent salon based in the English capital.

When tech becomes part of our beauty routine

The salon is being described by Amazon as an experiential venue for presenting new products and new technologies and, for the moment, there are no plans to open others.

If it is currently reserved for the employees of the American firm; the general public will be able to visit it in the coming weeks.

Although Amazon’s initiative may come as a surprise, it is part of a larger phenomenon: that of “beauty tech”. This term refers to the meeting of two initially very distinct worlds: beauty and new technologies.

The giants of the cosmetics industry are investing more and more in the development of innovative technologies that promise to make each of us the sole actor of our beauty routine.

The pandemic and the repeated closures of beauty spaces have contributed to the growth of this market which could be worth more than 34 billion dollars by 2024.

And brands like L’Oreal, MAC, Estée Lauder and even Chanel have understood this. The luxury house recently launched Lipscanner, a makeup application that instantly finds the lipstick that suits us best.

In two clicks, the artificial intelligence analyzes the color of an object or a photograph that we like and proposes its interpretation among the 400 “lip” products of the brand.

The selected product can then be virtually tried on oneself. It has never been so easy to apply makeup.