L'Oreal's ModiFace partners with Facebook to test AR experiences for shoppers, such as trying on virtual foundation shades or eyebrow shapes and hues
Context & Ripple Effects
This partnership is the first commercial payoff of L'Oreal's March 2018 acquisition of ModiFace, the Canadian startup with nearly 70 engineers building AR and AI for beauty — L'Oreal bought the capability and is now plugging it into a distribution channel it doesn't own.
For Facebook, it's a brand-name proof point for the AR ad tests it began running with select News Feed partners in July, and it builds on the Target Tracking beta that lets users launch AR by pointing their phone at an image.
First-order effects
- Shoppers can test foundation shades and eyebrow shapes inside Facebook's feed without visiting a counter, giving L'Oreal a direct conversion path from social impression to product decision.
- ModiFace's technology gets its first deployment at Facebook's scale, validating the acquisition as a platform play rather than an in-house app feature.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms must match the format to keep beauty ad budgets: Google later added foundation and hair dye options to its own AR beauty try-on tool and pushed it into Shopping ads, while Snap paired with Amazon on AR eyewear shopping lenses.
- Beauty brands gain leverage over retailers — if try-on happens in-feed, the point of purchase shifts toward whoever controls the ad surface, pressuring store counters and e-commerce pages to add equivalent AR.
Third-order effects
- Virtual try-on is consolidating into standard commerce infrastructure across platforms, with each player (Facebook, Google, Snap) bundling it into its ad products — and Facebook's parallel work on Orion AR smart glasses with Luxottica signals the same try-on layer eventually moving off the phone screen entirely.
The trend: Augmented-reality try-on is becoming a default advertising format, as consumer brands license their AR stacks to social platforms competing to own the pre-purchase moment.