Ashley Davis has been spending a considerable amount of monetary funds equivalent to $150 every two weeks for a long time. This fund helps add volume and length to her eyelashes with extensions. But instead of chatting with her usual eyelash technician, Davis fell asleep while a robot named Kate did the work. The cost of Kate was about $90.
LUUM, the beauty studio in Oakland, California, is where Davis visited. Unlike other studios, LUUM’s primary eyelash techs are robots specially trained to attend the clients by the utilization of an AI technology called computer vision.
Davis also mentioned that while living in the Bay Area and working in tech, one is used to visualize robots in a large volume. They have robots that deliver the food. There are also many robotic cars in the field that are driving around, taking videos of everything.
The company behind the AI-guided robots believes that the technology affordably makes eyelash extensions. The appearance of the devices in viral TikTok videos has raised questions about the safety and efficacy of robots enabling the performance of putting humans out of work.
Levi Shephard, the founder and president of the National Association of Lash Artists (NALA), said that human lash artists had flooded online forums and discussion boards with concerns about potential job loss because of the robots.
AI technology has been catapulted into popular discourse with the rise of natural language processing like ChatGPT. Kris Hauser, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that ChatGPT is used in Roomba vacuums and surgical settings. The research done by Kris Hauser specializes in open-world robotics. This is also considered one of the first AI robots to be used in the consumer beauty space.
The robotic eyelash extensions of LUUM are safe, cheaper and quicker to apply. They are more convenient than traditional eyelash extensions performed by humans, which typically take 90 minutes to an hour to perform. LUUM’s CEO and co-founder Nathan Harding said that robots don’t completely replace eyelash artists.
