As the fast-paced world of the luxury and glamour industries has steadily accelerated the rate at which high-end premium makeup products are created and released into the marketplace, the demand for these products has also increased. In 2024, where so much shopping takes place online, buying hot new makeup products is essential to many women, yet incredibly difficult to gauge through a computer screen. In response, VTO (virtual try-on) technology has sprung up to assuage these concerns, allowing users to virtually see an approximation of what they might look like wearing a certain cosmetic product before purchasing it. But whereas so much of this early-day tech is faulty and fails to appropriately convey the appearance of a given brand, Opaliris is navigating its way through the industry with its technological solutions to these problems.  

Opaliris founder Zhao Jian has co-founded multiple companies that have had successful multimillion-dollar exits in the past. He has a track record of success across multiple industries, often delivering new and innovative perspectives in the products his companies develop. So often, companies get caught within their own industry conventions and become resistant to change. However, with Opaliris, Zhao Jian looks to completely change how makeup products are produced and consumed. 

Opaliris will initially launch as a standalone marketplace app that will allow cosmetics companies to onboard their products. However, in the future, Opaliris’ vision involves building out a platform that any retailer can leverage. “Opaliris is poised to disrupt the current VTO experience with its generative AI models. Opaliris has created a generative AI model that can produce an extremely accurate representation of makeup products, which will give consumers more confidence when making their purchases.”  

Most existing makeup virtual try-on solutions tend to look inaccurate and don’t give a great sense of how the product actually appears. A lot of the time, they simply track the face and add an overlay. This means that they tend to have a hard time adjusting to different lighting situations or any occlusion. In stark contrast, Opaliris’ AI model technology will produce an extremely realistic virtual try-on solution that can easily handle the aforementioned challenges.  

However, one of the main downsides is that it doesn’t run in real-time. This means users need to upload a video and/or some images of themselves and wait for processing. This was a deal-breaker for several of the investors that Opaliris pitched to.  

Regardless, Jian and the team firmly believe that there are benefits to processing the images and video in the cloud upfront and insist that this will improve the overall experience. For instance, once a user has completed this process, they can shop for products and preview them in realistic conditions regardless of the condition of their immediate surroundings. The user can toggle between different products without having to move the camera around each time. Users could be shopping at night in the dark while in bed or already wearing other products. 

In this way, Opaliris looks to completely alter how the industry functions. By meeting the needs of a new generation of buyers and consumers on their own terms and servicing them directly through the use of current technological advancements, Opaliris is hoping to revolutionize the VTO experience.