Whoever said beauty is pain needs to rethink his choices because the digital revolution has made it much easier to achieve the goddess-like beauty standards that normal mortals were previously not capable of.
The selfie culture has given rise to beauty apps. When augmented reality face filters first appeared on social media, they were considered a gimmick. They allowed the users to play a kind of virtual dress-up, change their looks, or suddenly grow a moustache.
Today, more and more people, especially the young generation, have started using filters to beautify their appearance. Beauty apps have been introduced to deliver model-esque looks by sharpening, shrinking, enhancing, and recoloring faces and bodies. The apps come will millions of filters to suit the needs of the people.
The array of face filters enables users to change certain features with ease and flexibility through swipes and clicks.
Beauty apps are the most widespread area of utilization of augmented reality, and they have made a place for themselves in social media.
Beauty filters are essentially photo editing tools that use artificial intelligence and computer vision to detect facial features and change them. They utilize computer vision to interpret the things the camera sees and work according to to change them based on the designs made by the filter’s creator.
We are pretty much driven by technology in our day-to-day lives, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. We all want to look stunning or presentable or hide our deepest insecurities in the flesh. The fears have been utilized by the application makers in creating beautification apps. With a virtual tap, one can try on cosmetics or brighten her eyes. Indeed, these apps have been a blessing for everyone on this planet.
Beauty apps are convenient and provide wonderful features that can transform looks in a fraction of a second, and one can even try the products without visiting all the cosmetic shops to choose an appropriate shade of lipstick or foundation.
Beauty apps provide a pool of benefits to users. They are not only meant for products, and users can receive top beauty-related information from the top-brand publication. Some of the benefits of the beauty apps are given as follows:
- Beauty apps help to get a personal beauty guide: Beauty mobile apps are not only restricted to products, but these applications are a one-stop junction for all the makeup and fashion needs of the users. They can get the most out of the applications by reading, pinning, and sharing the information on social media channels with their friends.
- The beauty apps help to connect with the world through social media:
Social media dominates the world today, and connecting to people takes place through this medium. Beauty apps allow users to get connected and share information with other beauty enthusiasts across the globe.
It helps to build a community of like-minded makeup lovers and explore the various aspect of makeup and so much more.
- Beauty apps come with better selfie features to increase user engagement. The beauty apps allow users to enjoy cute filters and stickers and share a live video recording or selfie with a friend. The technology has been integrated so well into smartphone devices that it provides users with a real-time experience while they click selfies with the beauty apps.
- Virtual cosmetic products: The users no longer need to go to the cosmetic store or purchase expensive products. Instead, they can try virtual cosmetics that provide the most accurate facial mapping technology for a virtual makeover.
The users can apply numerous cosmetic products in real-time and save the images in the gallery.
- Most beauty apps are provided with a bunch of beauty products that the users can easily access to enable them to make the right decision. If the users are satisfied, they can initiate a purchase with the assigned payment options within the app.
What’s best is that it provides the users with multiple discounts associated with the products and helps them to gain insights about the latest products and the offers that come along with them.
- Beauty apps are not only limited to beauty these days. It is beyond these and offers the users nail art, hairstyles, fashion guides, and tutorial works that the users can focus on and further try and buy.
There are more than 2.6 million Apps on the Google play store and more than two million apps on the Apple App store, and the numbers are consistently increasing. The genre has emerged lately and has become an important aspect.
Thus, users are often faced with tough dilemmas on which apps to choose that would meet all their needful demands.
As a result, a list has been curated to meet the needs based on usage.
Top 10 best mobile beauty apps in India in 2023:
- Snapchat:
Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging application and service developed by Snap Inc, originally known as Snapchat inc. One of the most integral features of the application is that the messages and pictures are visible only for a short time.
The app has grown from originally focussing on person-to-person sharing to presently sharing stories with the users for twenty-four hours of chronological content.
It even allows users to store photos in a password-protected area called “my eyes only”. However, the beauty app has limited end-to-end encryption and plans to broaden it in the future.
The application primarily allows the users to create multimedia messages in the form of snaps that consists of a picture or a short video which can be edited to include filters and effects.
The video segments can be recorded to sixty seconds but are segmented into a ten seconds interval.
The application utilizes a real-time marketing strategy to make the interface appealing to the users.
One of the newly developed features that has been gaining much attention from youngsters is the lenses which allow the users to add fun, real-time effects and sounds, change their voices in the videos, face swap with friends, and many other features.
Snapchat has become the modern version of adding beauty with fun.
2. B612:
B612 is a player in the mobile beauty app sector. The application is an artistic photo editor and collage maker that allows users multiple numbers of stunning image editing tools at their fingertips.
One can edit his pictures using a wide variety of filters and effects like blending light/ texture and weather. Moreover, they can even add contrast, fade, tone, or grain-based on their photo requirements.
The application consists of the following features:
- The beauty app allows users to crop and resize their photos.
- With the help of the crop functionality, the users can rotate, resize or flip their pictures.
- Variety of filters with innumerable options of attractive stickers.
- The effects are stunning, and one can beautify their images by using various filters.
- Ultra HSL effects allow the users to adjust the grains, tones, sharpness, or contrast of an image.
- The app comes with an in-built collage maker where the user can select multiple images from the captured memory and select appropriate collage layouts. They can add borders and backgrounds of their chance.
- The share with friends option makes it easy to share edited photos in one tap. The users can add stylish text to the photo with any in-built stickers and make borders with the pictures.
The key specs of the beauty app are editing features like professional photos, an HSL color editor, and stylish photo editing filters.
The application was developed by Art Photo Video.
3. Candy Camera:
Candy Camera is the ultimate tool allowing users to amp up their selfie games. The beauty app was developed by the JP brothers and allows users to take splendid selfies with more than 100 filters. The selfies are captured with real-time effects, which means that the users can see live how they are looking with the effect present before capturing a picture.
The application consists of various beautification tools to style their selfies and uses easy to design collage function that helps to combine pictures.
In addition, the photo editor app comes with various stickers, frames, and light effects that can be added after taking a selfie to enhance the image.
The application has the following features:
- Beauty functions
- Stickers
- Silent Camera
- Collage
- Compatible with Android and ios
- a free beauty app and has no in-built advertisements
- Integrating with social networks makes sharing pictures easier.
4. Sweet Selfie:
Sweet Selfie is a popular beauty app meant for capturing selfies and editing them. The application was developed by Ufoto. It comes with plenty of additional features for the users to play around with, helping them to edit their pictures professionally or just for fun.
Sweet Selfie has a lot of attractive features. The users can freely crop and rotate their images, apply bright and colorful features, choose from the option of hundreds of stickers, and automatically or manually tune their face or body.
The application also allows the users to create a collage using many templates and grids to choose from.
Users can adjust their pictures’ brightness, saturation, contrast, and temperature and sharpen them.
The application has recently developed a new feature that allows users to create their music templates. Users can now combine their pictures in short music videos and even mix them in the videos adding their music.
Adding to the cherry on top of the cake is that the application is free of cost. However, some features need to be purchased but it is not necessary to enjoy the utility of the beauty app.
Even if one intends to purchase the content, the content is cost-effective and will add more fun to the image game giving an edge over the competitors trying to upgrade their selfie game.
One limitation is that it is not ad-free, and unnecessary pop-up ads may develop during usage.
The app may undergo some technical glitch and give off a black screen. But, the highs outweigh the cons as the users do not need to sign up to utilize the application.
5. Beautyplus:
Beautyplus- Magical camera is one of the renowned beauty apps for androids. It has every requirement that one needs to capture a perfect picture, from simple adjustments like brightness and contrast to AI-enabled edits like acne removal and facial feature modification.
When the user opens the application, they can decide whether they want to click a new picture or edit from a previously clicked picture. They can use tools for intelligent background selection or intelligent object replacement, having similar features to the Photoshop clone stamp.
One can adjust the image’s brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, highlights, shadows, clarity, and more from the adjustment panel, followed by using AI-enabled tools to reduce acne, change skin tone, shape, and size of the nose and the eye, and many more.
However, the beauty app does not come for free. Some of the features should be purchased, and to use them in the editing process, one has to make a monthly subscription after the 7-day free trial is finished. Sometimes, one can use the features if they view an ad before exporting an image.
However, the application requires Android 2.3 or higher and has a rating of 4.3 in the Google Playstore, which makes it in the list of the best mobile beauty apps in 2023.
6. YouCam Perfect:
YouCam perfect is the most powerful photo editor and beauty camera app for iPhone and Android that helps users to create stunning photos and beautiful selfies. The beauty application developed by Perfect Corporation ad provides plenty of photo editing and beautifying tools to bring the pictures to perfection.
The main feature of the application is auto-embellishment, which retouches the pictures automatically without the users having to do anything. The application shines with the many options that allow it to edit the shape of faces and eyes.
The users can make their faces look thin and eyes look bigger while selecting the intensity of the effect they want to apply.
Youcam perfect also comes with other features like the possibility of inserting many frames and multiple color filters that allow the users to give their pictures a different tone.
The application is also linked with social media apps that allow the user to directly post edited pictures on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platforms.
However, the beauty application runs on Android 4.0 or higher. Also, the benefit to selfie lovers is that the application is free of cost.
7. Camera 360:
Camera 360 is an image editing tool that allows users to apply dozens of unique filters of every kind to photographs. It will even allow the users to integrate the filters into the images when they capture them directly. 
The application comes with an easy and intuitive interface from where the user can access all the features. All it takes for the users are a few taps on the screen. The touch is good to go if one wants to frame a picture with a beautiful background or apply light to blur the image.
Features:
- The beauty app’s possibilities are truly tremendous. The user can apply thousands of color features to give their pictures a unique definition. The app comes with a sea of fun surprises.
- In addition to having an enormous number of features, the application is free and easy to use.
8. Facetune 2:
Facetune is a photo editing application used to edit, enhance, and retouch photos on a user’s iOS or android devices. The application was designed by lightricks. The app is used for portrait and selfie editing.
It has several beauty filters allowing the users to apply edits such as teeth whitening, removal of blemishes, smoothening the skin, enhancing the skin tone, correcting bad lighting, contouring, and adding makeup.
Users can select from different filters, lighting, textures, contrast, and frame options.
Facetune 2 was launched in November 2016 and consists of updated features like realistic facial editing that is changing facial expressions and the ability to re-light the subject after the photo has been captured.
It can change the background of the photo, live selfie editing, more makeup options, and the addition of glitter.
Furthermore, users can share the images on various social media platforms.
9. Retrica:
Retrica is a photo and beauty app that allows users to add different kinds of filters to their photos, similar to Instagram. One can apply the filters in real-times o that one can know how a photo will look even before the user captures it.
In total, Retrica consisted of more than eighty different filters with, many different styles although all of them have a vintage twist to them. The application consists of features with sepia tones, black and white tones, muted tones, etc.
In addition to editing or adding filters to simple photos, one can also add collages by selecting the option. The user can select up to nine consecutive snapshots to create a fun and original composition.
It consists of many features like artificial shading or a timer, allowing the users to take pictures on a tripod.
Retrica is one of the key players in beauty apps. It has emerged as a photo editing app on iOS devices and has made its debut in the android sector. The app is free.
The features of the application are:
- Video recording with attractive features
- Decorate the images with brand-new stamps.
- Enjoy more UI and beautiful icons.
- Constant updates to improve the speed and reliability of the application regularly.
10. VSCO: Photo and beauty editor:
VSCO is a beauty app that gives ordinary pictures an elegant touch. The user can capture pictures from the VSCO app itself, which are saved in an in-built filter and are provided with thumbnail previews. It makes it easy for the users to easily select the images that the user can work on at any point.
One can adjust the color, contrast, brilliance, etc., and adjust the corresponding parameters.
The beauty application is integrated with social media applications so that the user can send pictures directly. Apart from that, VSCO saves all the information about each image. The information includes the date on which the filters were clicked, the filters the user used to edit it, and many others.
VSCO has a more professional interface that makes it an excellent photo editing tool and provides better results than its competition.
However, the main limitation of the application is that it is not free, and the premium applications can be accessed only on a purchase basis.
Wrap Up:
The advent of beauty apps and social media has made us look better superficially but feel worse inside. The use of social media platforms has made us compare our bodies and get the perfect shot, edit them with multiple filters and upload them while scrolling through the social media platform in an attempt to be validated.
In a short span, beauty apps have made it possible for enhancing low-quality photos to completely change the way how people perceive them.
The mass adoption of such beauty apps is normal but highlights an issue of concern about “ body positivity” and “self-acceptance”.
These apps commodify insecurities. Our insecurities are being exploited by the application developers to gain profits, and who is the sufferer here- the users who think that their face is not the perfect shape and scar makes them look ugly or fit into the descri[tion the society has provided for beauty.
These beauty apps are fun and games unless it affects someone’s insecurity. The users should draw a clear line on where to stop utilizing such apps.
What is beauty if it is not skin deep?
Edited by Prakriti Arora
