The Estée Lauder Firms (ELC) has been awarded the Innovation Award on the 2025 World 50 Influence Awards for its Voice-enabled Make-up Assistant (VMA), a cellular app developed to help visually impaired customers in making use of make-up independently. The award reinforces rising business recognition that accessibility isn’t solely a social crucial however a market alternative.
CosmeticsDesign spoke to Robin Shum, Lead, Product Administration, and Lynda Pack, Interim CIO at ELC for added insights into the R&D behind the corporate’s VMA expertise and its influence on business stakeholders.
A strategic response to market gaps
With over 1.3 billion folks worldwide dwelling with a incapacity or neurodiversity—and solely 4% of magnificence and private care manufacturers actively addressing their wants—ELC noticed a transparent hole, Pak defined.
“The Estée Lauder Firms acknowledged the chance to create inclusive expertise that might empower and serve the underserved market of people with bodily and visible disabilities,” she shared.
“The inspiration for creating the Voice-enabled Make-up Assistant (VMA),” she added, “stemmed from our dedication to making a extra accessible magnificence business.”
For producers and suppliers, this technique represents a shift in product improvement priorities: adaptive options and inclusive design are quick changing into non-negotiable for immediately’s magnificence shopper.
Human-centered analysis fuels product design
ELC’s improvement of VMA started with “human-centric person analysis and in-depth interviews with visually impaired and blind contributors throughout the globe, offering our design workforce with actual insights into the wants and challenges confronted by this group,” Pak defined.
Following ELC’s preliminary international analysis, the corporate labored with visually impaired and blind shopper contributors to co-develop its VMA expertise in collaboration with the group it aimed to serve. “The event technique of VMA was a collaborative effort,” Pak shared. “We labored carefully with visually impaired people to co-create this progressive resolution.”
These insights knowledgeable each side of the instrument, which makes use of real-time voice steerage and AI to evaluate product software—akin to lipstick, eyeshadow, or basis—and provides corrective suggestions to the person. “Our focus has been on usability, guaranteeing that the applying is accessible and empowering for visually impaired customers,” she mentioned.
“This suggestions was instrumental in designing the app to be as intuitive and user-friendly as potential, with little to no studying curve,” she defined.
VMA combines good mirror expertise with ELC’s proprietary augmented actuality, AI, and machine studying capabilities. It audibly identifies the place make-up is utilized, checks for evenness, and alerts customers to areas needing touch-ups.
In keeping with the corporate’s press launch, “VMA identifies any areas on the face that will require extra correct software and audibly describes the place contact ups could also be wanted.”
Trade recognition with enterprise implications
“Successful the Innovation Award on the 2025 World 50 Influence Awards is a proud second for ELC and a testomony to our dedication to inclusivity and accessibility,” Pak shared. “This recognition acknowledges the halo impact of our work,” she added, ”not simply in empowering our blind and visually impaired customers, however in setting a precedent for industries to reimagine inclusion-driven innovation.”
Held on March 12 in Miami, the World 50 Influence Awards acknowledged 9 class winners chosen from over 100 entries representing 65 firms throughout 15 nations. ELC’s award displays the rising affect of inclusive innovation on model fairness and shopper loyalty.
Product management and future affect
Shum has been a part of the VMA initiative from its early levels and helped information the expertise’s person analysis, improvement, and design. “It’s an honor for this vital work to be acknowledged by way of the World 50 Influence Awards,” Shum instructed CosmeticsDesign.
“I hope this encourages different firms to construct inclusive options and conjures up leaders to ask how they’ll empower expertise and design groups to create universally accessible options.”
ELC first launched VMA within the UK and Eire in January 2023, adopted by the US in April 2023 and Mexico in Could 2024. With its continued rollout, the corporate is signaling to producers, packaging suppliers and expertise companions that accessibility is now a part of the posh expertise.
