Beauty Technology

This book introduces the term Beauty Technology, a Wearable Computing paradigm that uses the body s surface as an interactive platform by integrating technology into beauty products applied directly to one s skin, fingernails, and hair. Conductive Makeup, Tech Nails, Hairware and FX e-makeup are some examples of beauty prototypes that were adapted with electronic components in order to sense muscle movements as inputs to trigger devices and communicate with the wearer, other objects and the virtual world.§What if we could activate the world with just a blink? Make a left wink and turn the lights on; check your last emails with your right wink. Beauty Technology proposes the use of Conductive Makeup to sense voluntary blinking. It connects sensors and actuators using conductive materials that stick to the skin as well-defined eyeliner. Black false eyelashes are chemically metalized to act as switches for sensing blinking. Blinklifier and Arcana are examples of Beauty Tech products that communicate by amplifying blinking and creating gestures to change light patterns, activate different music tracks and display different images, respectively. Superhero is another example of the use of conductive false eyelashes and makeup to levitate objects by blinking.§Could your skin act as an interface? A facial expression conveys an emotion but what if a voluntary expression could trigger an electronic device? FX e-makeup, a Beauty Technology prototype based on traditional FX makeup combined with sensors that can sense muscle movements as the skin folds on the musculature of the face. Winkymote is an infrared remote control placed near the eye to help people with quadriplegic disabilities control the electronics around them. Kinisi uses FX e-makeup to hide sensors and LEDs on the face, which light in different patterns triggered by the facial muscles.§Imagine that you don't need a card for opening your door, or for paying your bus ticket. Imagine that you don't need to carry any ticket for going to a movie session. Go and shop at the supermarket or rent a book at the library without a wallet or ID card, just point and pay for it, everything at your fingertips: your nails. Beauty Technology Nails embed technology components into fake nails in order to interact with the ambient in different ways. Beauty Tech Nails provide fashionable, inexpensive and wireless devices attached to fingernails, with no need for powered external components. They have embedded RFID tags in order to create actuators to communicate with the wearer, other objects and the virtual world. For example, instead of using a staff card to open the office door, a secret combination of finger movements with RFID nails could identify employees and grant them access as demonstrated in the project called Abrete Sesamo (Open Sesame) [2]. The invisible tracking advantages of RFID tags brought positive applications in different contexts such as retail automation, bridging the gap between digital networks and the physical world [4].§Humans convey over two-thirds of their ideas and feelings through the body, producing up to 700,000 physical signs, where 1000 are bodily postures, 5000 are hand gestures, and 250,000 are facial expressions [5]. We are intimately familiar with our own bodies from birth and due to human agency, we are aware of the initiating, executing, and controlling of our own body. Moreover, knowing that we have roughly 2m2 of skin, placing sensors onto the skin for sensing physical changes seems to be the obvious next step in Wearable Computing. This work analyses micro and macro body movements to propose interfaces that react to voluntary movements. In this way, a voluntary blinking could be sensed by Conductive Makeup, voluntary facial movements such as closing eyes, raising an eyebrow, smiling and closing the lips could be sensed by FX e-makeup and finger approximation by Beauty Tech Nails.§From the very first civilizations to the present day, beauty products