This App Will Change The Way You Buy Makeup

We're the first to admit the fact that shopping for makeup ain't easy. Since your tone dictates what colors look best on you, and you can't exactly go into every store and try on hundreds of lipsticks, finding your pitch-perfect hue is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, whenever a new technology claims to help us in our ongoing cosmetics collecting, we're hopeful (yet skeptical). We've been burned before by apps that claim to be miracle workers and wind up just leaving us 99 cents poorer and with no matching magic to show for it. Which is exactly why Plum Perfect, a just-released free app for iPhones, is such a breath of fresh air.

Plum Perfect calls itself a color expert, and we'd actually agree with that. The breakdown is fairly simple: snap a selfie on the app and Plum Perfect analyzes your face. It then assembles your color signature, breaking it down by the shade of your lips, your skin tone, your eye hue, and your hair. Save your profile, and Plum Perfect presents you with a bevy of cosmetics to match.

What separates Plum Perfect from other color matching apps is its detail. The app breaks down the products by categories and sub categories. Instead of just searching "lips," you click "lips" and are asked if you're looking for a lip stain, lip gloss, lipliner, and so on. There are also makeup matches for certain scenarios: glam, office, and natural.

But, like all of these apps, it comes with some small glitches. You need to have a well-lit, shadow-free selfie in order for the color scanner to work 100% correctly. My initial photo was only slightly dark, and the app called my hazel-green eyes dark and cool. Not so.

Minor issues aside, this app is truly like a personal cosmetics shopper, and it's great for experimenting when you're looking for a new hue but not willing or able to invest the time to do the on-the-ground research. Click on over to the the app store to download, and kiss your frustrating beauty buys buh-bye.