Would You Let a Robot Do Your Makeup?

By now, there's a good chance you've mastered your makeup routine to the point where you could do it in your sleep (or at least after hitting the snooze button five times). But what if there was a way to automate beauty? After all, we're in a digital age: you can use your phone to lock the doors of your house and order food for a party with just a few clicks. Is a robot makeup artist what's next on the horizon? The latest creation of students Maya Pindeus and Johanna Pichlbauer of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria will convince you to stick to old-fashioned, manual makeup.

Their interactive Beautification machine debuted at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2015 to much fanfare. Made up of several components — an eyeliner applicator, a lipstick wheel, and a light mask — the installation was designed to "spark the conversation about the nature of beauty and the emotional potential of human/machine relationships." Gallery visitors were invited to place their faces in front of the machines and let the robots do their thing. While the artists expected the machines to feel "creepy and threatening," they found there was a more affectionate side to each robot. "Its tireless spins, the way it didn't quite succeed . . . it seemed to have its own ideas of what looked good [on] a human face."

While Pindeus and Pichlbauer intended to create a dialogue about the interaction between humans and machines, we're inspired to take a closer look at our own beauty routine. Are we painting our faces the way we truly want to or the way society expects us to appear? Seeing makeup reduced to such a mechanical procedure has us excited to break out of our daily rut and get a little more creative.