AI vs HI: Which is Better for Beauty Care?

Today over 80% of beauty brands relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate and refer products to buyers after scanning their skin and hair problems (Toosi et al., 2024). This certain inclination of the beauty and wellness companies towards using AI can be justified as their means of reducing chances of human trials and errors. 

However, the fact that ‘AI is human engineered’ and runs on the data that is fed by humans has made the concept of using AI for identifying specific hair and skin concerns a bit conflicting. AI companies have been tagging a disclaimer “The AI is in its learning mode and can make errors”, but this persistence of adopting AI models for identifying problems is a baffling idea. 

Contrarily, Human Intelligence (HI) is superior to AI in terms of years of learning, practical experience, emotional stability, creativity and ethical responsibility. Few beauty brands still rely on HI as it helps in extending customized care support rather than random care alternatives, unlike AI. 

So, let’s dig deep to understand which intelligence works better in the beauty industry, till date!

There are several factors that are driving the interests of Beauty brands towards adopting AI powered operations. 

Here are some of the major factors that are luring the beauty brands to adopt AI over HI: 

• Faster Recommendations: 

Using AI helps the beauty brands in reducing the waiting time while providing the buyers with quick and efficient suggestions to their queries. It is an initiative towards improving the customer experience as they move towards making a purchase from the brand (An and Ngo, 2025). Moreover, this AI integration helps most beauty brands in improving their decision-making speed, which helps in reducing the turn-around time and improve their audience reach. 

• Reduced Dependency on Manual Consultation: 

Most businesses believe that reducing human intervention helps in reducing the chances of flaws and doubts while making it both accessible and convenient (Ojika et al., 2022). Again, some companies aim at reducing the cost of operations by reducing the labour costs while automating the complete consultation setting. Adopting AI helps in reducing dependence on human cosmetologists and beauty consultants, thereby reducing corporate labour costs while minimizing the chances of incorrect suggestions. 

• Scalable Customer Support: 

Integrating AI has been helping the beauty brands in addressing the common hair and skin related queries of large number of users simultaneously without compromising on the quality of services promised. The scalability of the idea of using AI has aided beauty businesses to reduce waiting time while reducing their reliance on hiring a large number of human consultants to address the beauty concerns and queries of the buyers.  

The most prioritized problem with AI is that it is still in its learning stage while continuously improving its performance based on human feedback. 

Among different other problems like lack of Emotional Intelligence or empathy, information misuse etc. some of the most prominent are discussed here: 

• AI Relies on Human Input: 

The AI systems are being continuously designed, trained and improved by humans, subject expertise and their feedback. So, it is expected that the performance of AI bots is heavily reliant on quality, diversity and the accuracy of information that is been fed to the same by the humans. Relying heavily on these AI models can result to errors while screening the customer concerns or suggesting solutions. 

• Risk of Misinterpretation: 

AI is driven by certain algorithms and data feeds that can often make incorrect decisions while assessing the skin tone, texture, pigmentation, severity of acne, hair fall patterns or scalp conditions while being deceived by lighting, image quality etc. The inaccurate assessment of skin and hair conditions might lead to incorrect recommendations, aggravating the concern further.  

• Human Expertise Goes Beyond Algorithms: 

Humans bring in their practical experience, their precise subject knowledge and personal judgement alongside ethical responsibility. The practical experience and empathy of humans help humans in assessing skin history, allergies, effects of weather change, diet, hormonal changes, stress and previous product reactions. This is what makes humans superior to AI as they can still make informed decisions while relying solely on life experiences, core subject knowledge and understanding the specific care priorities of buyers. 

• Emotional, Cultural and Lifestyle Awareness: 

The superiority of humans is basically reliant on their degree of emotional intelligence (EI) as people understand the basic emotions, shows empathy, is aware of cultural backgrounds and different lifestyle factors. This EI of humans help in understanding client problems more easily and accurately while providing personalized and meaningful guidance, unlike AI that relies on human feeds and data (Resnik, 2008). So, clearly human intelligence outwits AI when it comes to beauty consultation against AI models. 

• Deeper Consultation Through Follow-Up Questions: 

Follow-ups and feedback from the buyers helps the beauty brands in understanding the shortcoming and flaws in their products or the customer care needs. In this connection, using AI models often limits the scope of feedback collection to three to four turns whereas human consultants can conduct multiple turn conversations with the buyers through interactive discussions and deeper assessment of the problem area or further improvement priorities. Therefore, in this regard, using Human Intelligence over AI is mostly appreciated as it helps beauty brands to come up with effective solutions while adhering to specific buyer requirements. 

Finally, if any brand is focused to provide a personalised beauty care experience to the buyers, then relying on humans rather than AI models.  

While beauty companies have moved into AI consulting services, we continue to put our faith in the intelligence of human beings since beauty care involves much more than recommendations generated by algorithms; it involves comprehension, knowledge and empathy.

Our professional team of cosmetologists and beauty specialists utilize their experience and skill in assessing buyers through direct interaction and conversation so that we can understand their respective skincare and hair problems to provide them with personalised solutions. 

At its best, we believe beauty consultation consists of listening and asking the right questions followed by carefully crafted solutions, rather than generic recommendations generated automatically.

Although AI has revolutionized the way things work in the beauty sector with consultations becoming quick and efficient, but no consultation can be applied universally in beauty treatment. Every beauty concern is linked to various aspects of human life, which an AI model might not be able to fully understand through virtual assessments. AI is faster in taking decisions, but they still lack empathy and are run by algorithms that are fed by humans. 

What does it take to give adequate advice or treatment in the beauty care industry? Beauty treatments and care needs personalisation which only humans can understand efficiently based on emotions, empathy, understanding etc. 

So, why go for forb AI when HI can provide much personalised solutions that resolves every skin and hair problem flawlessly?  

• An, G.K. and Ngo, T.T.A., 2025. AI-powered personalized advertising and purchase intention in Vietnam’s digital landscape: The role of trust, relevance, and usefulness. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 11(3), p.100580. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2199853125001155
• McKinsey & Company, 2025. How beauty players can scale gen AI in 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/how-beauty-players-can-scale-gen-ai-in-2025
• Ojika, F.U., Owobu, W.O., Abieba, O.A., Esan, O.J., Ubamadu, B.C. and Daraojimba, A.I., 2022. The role of artificial intelligence in business process automation: A model for reducing operational costs and enhancing efficiency. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Growth Evaluation, 3(1), pp.842-860. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390825395_The_Role_of_Artificial_Intelligence_in_Business_Process_Automation_A_Model_for_
  Reducing_Operational_Costs_and_Enhancing_Efficiency
• Resnik, D.B., 2008. Social benefits of human subjects research. Journal of clinical research best practices, 4(11), p.1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3920587/
• Toosi, R., Hosseini, S.H., Nosraty, N. and Rahmatian, F., 2024. Artificial intelligence, health, and the beauty industry. International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Studies, 4(3), pp.1689-1698. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reza-Toosi/publication/392704511_Artificial_Intelligence_Health_and_the_Beauty_Industry/links/6856e957cdf1a35eb1748be2/Artificial-Intelligence-Health-and-the-Beauty-Industry.pdf