Since my freshman year of college, I’ve used the same tiny, silver makeup mirror I picked up with my mom during a dorm-shopping trip at Bed Bath & Beyond. We bought it alongside twin XL bedsheets, bath towels, and a shower caddy that have all since landed in the dark depths of the garbage—but somehow, the mirror has survived. For all these years, it’s done its job: allowing me to see my face clearly while I pick at my skin (sorry!), pluck my eyebrows, and apply makeup. Isn’t that all a makeup mirror is for? Apparently not, according to Swan Beauty.
On January 14, the brand released a 15-inch AI-powered mirror with five technology pillars—an AI skin analyzer, a smart makeup artist, a personalized routine builder, a shoppable marketplace, and an “embedded social community”—a far cry from my now-ancient glass plucked from a now-extinct retail shelf. For the past week, I ditched my low-frills mirror and exclusively used Swan’s iteration, which comes with three lighting temperatures (warm, cool, neutral) and seven levels of brightness, and follows in the footsteps of smart mirrors like Tonal and Lululemon Studio in tech and price: It’ll cost you $795 for the aluminum hardware and an additional $10 per month to access the AI and AR tools housed within the mirror’s interface.
When a gifted sample arrived at my doorstep, I felt conflicted—I’ve been trying my best to avoid using artificial intelligence due to its reputation for encouraging mindless slop and plagiarism, perpetuating harmful biases, not to mention its extremely negative environmental impact. But no matter how much I recoil at the sight of a ChatGPT-written email, it feels like AI is quickly being integrated into everything, even beauty. Is Swan’s iteration the future of tech or just another case of beauty brand AI-washing?
The most prominent use of AI in the Swan mirror is the feature I was, admittedly, the most excited for: the skin analyzer. After you answer six questions about different facets of your skin—including oil production, current condition, overall skin type, and your age—it takes a photo of your face and tracks seven key skin concerns: wrinkles, pigmentation, texture, oiliness, redness, acne, and UV spots. Based on those metrics, it gives your skin a “score” somewhere between 0 and 100. Personally tailored tips and product recommendations pop up on the mirror immediately after your scan. According to Colby Mitchell, the brand’s cofounder and CEO, the feature was built by dermatologists who read “thousands of faces” that they manually rated against the seven parameters “to make [Swan’s] machine as smart as it can be.”
You may be thinking, Why the hell would I need to track my skin? It’s a fair question. But tracking could actually come in handy if you’re trying to gauge the efficacy of a new product, identify specific skin triggers, or are just curious to know if it really was that third glass of wine that made your redness more pronounced.
I took two or three scans per day over the course of nine days, and my score stayed in the 87-91 range; I could work on my UV spots, apparently, and Swan recommends I use products containing niacinamide and arbutin (both known for their skin-brightening properties) to get my score up. The skin analyzer also clocked my undereye and smile lines as wrinkles, which knocked down my score despite being two things a typical human face has. Mitchell says people of all ages can benefit from using the Swan mirror, but no one is 100% free of lines, and therefore no one will have a perfect, wrinkle-free score. When asked for clarification, the Swan team said that the skin analyzer “identifies visible features like under-eye lines and smile lines because they’re a natural part of how skin evolves over time.” They added that “a 60-year-old is not evaluated against a 25-year-old, and natural aging is never framed as a failure.” And while I agree, I’m not sure the rest of the world does quite yet.
