Boots introduces new colour matching service for cosmetic foundations

Health and beauty products retailer Boots UK has introduced a new No7 Foundation Match Made Service, a new service to accurately measure colour contrast of customers’ skin and offer the closest matching makeup foundation from the firm’s No7 Foundation collection.

Developed by X-Rite Incorporated, a UK-based designer and manufacturer of colour management solutions, the new service is offered using a X-Rite spectrocolourimeter instrument, which aims to target the closest matches among 17 colours of No7 foundations for many formats.

The firm said it has deployed the new service in 668 stores in the UK and appointed more than 1,000 No7 advisors to assist No7 Foundation Match Made Service.

Boots claims it has carried out more than three years of research and development to create the new service, which was sampled on 2,000 British women to measure the skin tones.

The firm said it has created a new shade palette of skin-true foundation shades unique to No7.

Boots UK innovation technologist Joanne Watson said the firm’s investigation found that 78% of women in the UK are willing to change their foundation if they could find a better option.

"Our customers who have used the No7 Foundation Match Made Service say it delivers on providing accurate, better matches. They are very, very satisfied with the results,"Watson added.

The firm’s new device is fixed with proprietary camera technology, which illuminates the skin from three different directions, while parallelly capturing 27 colour-accurate images within two seconds.

The results are revealed by a digital photo of a person’s skin, and the foundation colour that is the closest match.

Watson said. "It takes the guesswork out of trying to find a shade since there is so much choice in the market now. They particularly like that the Match Made device has its own internal light source, so the lighting in the store doesn’t impact the way the shade is selected."