In 2025, a Zepeto user completed a look using Dior Beauty’s “Midnight Mist” digital eyeshadow on a virtual platform, packaged it as a programmable asset within their digital identity protocol, and then synced it into Animal Crossing’s skin system—all in under three minutes. Behind this seemingly simple action lies a profound paradigm shift: beauty, an industry with a five-thousand-year history, is evolving from chemical formulas and physical packaging into a new form defined by code, algorithms, and composable digital assets.
The core of traditional beauty is embellishing reality; the essence of metaverse beauty is creating reality. When Givenchy releases limited virtual lipsticks in Animal Crossing, or when NARS issues NFTs that embody specific aesthetic propositions, they are no longer selling color itself. They are selling a verifiable digital identity code, a portable aesthetic protocol, and a passport to a particular community. This article looks beyond the surface of “AR try-ons” and “virtual goods” to analyze the three foundational layers being built by the beauty metaverse—from technical infrastructure to identity politics to entirely new business paradigms—and explores how this transformation is redefining beauty, self-expression, and even human interaction.
Dissecting the Technology Stack: A Three-Layer Leap from Filters to Verifiable Assets
The beauty metaverse is not the result of a single technological breakthrough, but an ecosystem supported by three interdependent architectural layers. Understanding this stack is fundamental to understanding all commercial innovation.
At the top is the interaction and presentation layer—the interface users directly perceive. AR virtual try-on apps and social media filters catalyzed by the pandemic represent early forms of this layer. Powered by mature computer vision and real-time facial tracking, they can map digital makeup onto dynamic faces in milliseconds. Metaverse scenarios, however, demand higher-dimensional presentation: in Zepeto or future immersive spaces, makeup must adapt to varied lighting conditions, different avatar facial topologies, and interact in real time with clothing, hairstyles, and environmental lighting. This pushes rendering from simple “texture mapping” to physically based material simulation, enabling virtual lipstick to display realistic moisture and gloss, and eyeshadow to shift subtle iridescence with changing light angles. Competition at this layer is essentially a race between rendering fidelity and real-time performance.
The middle layer is the asset and protocol layer—the true core of metaverse beauty. A digital look is no longer just an image but a structured, programmable asset bundle. It may include PBR material spheres, deformation meshes suitable for different facial topologies, shader code describing how colors behave under varying light, and—most importantly—metadata. This metadata defines ownership, scarcity, composability, and usage rights. This is where NFT technology becomes critical: it transforms makeup from infinitely reproducible images into digital objects with unique identities and clear property rights. When brands like Gucci launch virtual fragrance NFTs, their value lies not only in the 3D model, but in programmable privileges such as “triggering exclusive visual effects when applied in specific virtual spaces.” This layer is building a digital beauty “property registry.”
The bottom layer is the identity and data layer—the most strategic and sensitive of all. Each user’s avatar and makeup choices form an evolving digital aesthetic profile. This profile records not just “what colors you used,” but—through machine learning—reveals “which aesthetic styles you choose in which contexts,” and “how your virtual identity diverges from or converges with your real-world identity.” When users deploy the same NARS-issued “Power Red Lips” asset across multiple platforms, brands are effectively tracking cross-metaverse aesthetic consistency. This raises severe challenges: how can personalization be delivered while protecting facial data, aesthetic preferences, and modes of identity expression from misuse? Decentralized identity protocols may offer partial solutions by enabling selective disclosure, but the balance point remains elusive.
Reconstructing Identity Politics: From Adorning Faces to Writing the Self
The most profound impact of the beauty metaverse occurs at the philosophical and sociological level: it renegotiates the contract between “reality,” “self,” and “expression.”
In the physical world, makeup is artistic creation on a given biological foundation—bone structure and skin texture form the canvas. In digital realms, the canvas itself becomes an editable variable. One can choose vessels entirely detached from human form: Dior’s iconic cannage pattern displayed on the facial panel of a cybernetic body, or Estée Lauder’s neon highlights flowing beneath translucent elven skin. Beauty thus shifts from a “technique of adornment” to a full-fledged technology of identity construction. Brands are no longer selling products that make you “more beautiful,” but toolkits that allow you to “become another form of existence.” This explains why niche cyberpunk or fantasy aesthetics thrive in the metaverse—they enable extreme identity experiments impossible in the physical world.
This gives rise to the concept of “liquid aesthetic identity.” Within a single day, the same user might attend a virtual board meeting in a formal Chanel look, switch thirty minutes later to a fluorescent MAC × anime IP face paint for a music festival, and appear at night in a fully AI-generated “nebula gradient” facial effect that has no real-world analogue. The cost of switching looks approaches zero; changing identities becomes as effortless as switching browser tabs. Such high-frequency identity fluidity dissolves the traditional fashion concept of “style,” long built on scarcity and consistency. Individuals no longer need a singular “personal style,” but rather the ability to rapidly call, mix, and recombine aesthetic components.
This liquidity ultimately points to new digital stratification. Access to high-fidelity digital makeup libraries from top brands, ownership of scarce artist-collaboration NFTs, or even the ability to customize proprietary shaders will become new ways for digital natives to display cultural capital and technical literacy. In virtual worlds, a “refined look” may signal fluency in blockchain wallets, cross-platform asset compatibility, or even familiarity with GLSL shading languages. Beauty—traditionally categorized as “light luxury consumption”—unexpectedly becomes a hardcore showcase of digital literacy and wealth in the metaverse.
A Shift in Business Paradigms: When Brands Become Aesthetic Operating Systems
Facing such deep change, the commercial logic of the beauty industry is being completely rewritten. Successful brands will no longer be cosmetics suppliers, but builders and standard-setters of digital aesthetic ecosystems.
Traditionally, brands built moats by controlling supply chains, channels, and marketing narratives. In the metaverse, core competitiveness shifts to the ability to create interactive, extensible, programmable digital aesthetic assets. This requires entirely new internal structures: beyond formulation chemists and marketing experts, brands need real-time graphics engineers, smart-contract developers, and metaverse economy designers. L’Oréal has already begun hiring “virtual product managers” and “metaverse beauty advisors”—this is only the beginning. Future product launches may no longer take place on Paris runways, but on fully brand-built virtual planets, livestreaming interactive, game-engine-rendered demonstrations of “makeup evolution” to a global audience.
Business model innovation unfolds along three paths. The first is direct sales of digitally native products, such as virtual lipstick NFTs or subscription-based “monthly makeup packs.” The second is “phygital” hybrid experiences: purchasing a physical lipstick unlocks its AR effects and corresponding virtual asset, forming a closed loop. The third—and most promising—path is licensing and ecosystem revenue sharing: brands package signature aesthetics (e.g., YSL’s sequin texture, Charlotte Tilbury’s rose-gold glow) into standardized shaders or material kits for third-party virtual world developers, sharing revenue. In this scenario, brands resemble Intel or Dolby, with their “technology” embedded across countless virtual experiences.
The greatest opportunity and challenge lies in the systematization of user-generated content. Just as Roblox cultivated a new generation of game developers, the beauty metaverse will give rise to a new profession: the “digital makeup artist.” Using brand-provided toolkits, they create original looks, trade them on secondary markets, or design exclusive aesthetic norms for specific virtual communities. Brands’ roles will shift from “creating all content” to “creating the best tools and the most vibrant creator economy.” Lancôme’s future competitors may not be Estée Lauder, but tech companies offering more creator-friendly SDKs, or virtual platforms with more active creator communities.
Beauty as a Programmable Reality
When we gaze through the prism of the beauty metaverse, we see far more than business opportunities or technological spectacle. We see a mirror of the digital age, reflecting humanity’s unending desire for self-expression and technology’s growing power to fulfill it.
This transformation poses an ultimate question: when our digital faces can be edited at will, when beauty becomes plug-and-play modules, when identities are rented like outfits on a daily basis—where does the “true” self reside? In the physical body constrained by biological laws, or in the digital avatar free to soar across countless parallel worlds?
Beauty brands—ancient storytellers that once taught us to narrate ourselves through color—now stand at an unprecedented crossroads. They can choose to merely digitize existing products and continue selling electronic lipsticks on virtual shelves; or they can embrace a far grander mission: to write the first grammar for humanity’s faces in the digital age, draw the first maps, and establish the first currency systems through which these new visages circulate.
When the first child raised in the metaverse understands “makeup” to mean downloading and installing a facial effects package, the old beauty world we know—centered on mirrors, brushes, and chemical bottles—will have become an object of digital archaeology. The door to the new world is already open, and the faces beyond it are being sketched, line by line, by code, consensus, and limitless imagination.
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