Blank Beauty

Customizing makeup is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to match, making it challenging for consumers to find the perfect shade.

Choosing makeup is difficult—it's expensive, color matching is tricky, and needs change daily. Blank Beauty set out to revolutionize nail polish with a device that could mix any custom shade on demand. Inspired by made-to-order home paint systems, they envisioned an app-enabled device that could take a picture of any color, translate it into precise pigment drops, mix the ingredients, and produce a ready-to-use nail polish.

To make this vision a reality, they needed a design as elegant and desirable as the beauty products it would sit beside. The challenge was to develop a functional, mess-free system that could precisely dispense pigment, thoroughly mix it, and be intuitive for users.

Designing a precise, user-friendly, and mess-free system

To ensure an intuitive experience, we developed a push-pull cartridge system that made loading and replacing pigments effortless while preventing spills and drying.

Achieving precise pigment dispensing required peristaltic pumps, allowing for exact drops of color without waste. However, keeping the pigment from drying and clogging the system meant the entire dispensing process had to function within a vacuum-sealed environment.

Solving the mixing challenge through iterative prototyping

One of the biggest challenges was mixing. Early prototypes resulted in a well-mixed center but inconsistent blending near the edges. To solve this, we integrated a mixing mechanism directly into the nail polish container, enabling the entire container to spin and create a uniform, homogeneous mixture. This ensured a high-quality final product without requiring additional user steps.

A device that delivers personalized beauty on demand.

The final design was an intuitive, consumer-friendly device that could produce custom nail polish colors on demand. Users simply selected a color via the app, and the device dispensed precise pigment ratios into a base formula, mixed it, and delivered a ready-to-use polish.

• Effortless Customization: Users can create any nail color with precision using app-guided pigment dispensing.
• No-Mess Mixing: The integrated container mixer ensures perfect blending every time.
• Vacuum-Sealed System: Prevents pigment drying and clogging, ensuring long-term reliability.
• Refined Industrial Design: A sleek, department-store-ready aesthetic that blends beauty with technology.

Since its initial consumer-focused launch, the company has shifted toward a B2B model, with larger devices now being developed for retail environments, such as Walmart aisle-end installations.