What an AI beauty advisor tells us about the future of consumer data

Singer-songwriter and businesswoman Rihanna built Fenty Beauty into a billion-dollar enterprise by doing what the beauty industry was too slow to do on its own: seeing people who had been ignored and making products for them.

Forty-four foundation shades at launch in 2017 was not a marketing stunt; it was a business philosophy built on accessibility, visibility and inclusivity. Where the industry standard of 33 shades failed to reflect the fuller spectrum of darker hues, Fenty changed the state of play.

With the launch of Rose Amber, its AI-powered beauty advisor built for WhatsApp, it is doing so again.

But this shift is more than a beauty innovation. It is a privacy story.

The very data that powers Fenty's promise of radical personalization, shade preferences, skin undertone, hair texture and skin conditions, is the same data that privacy law treats with heightened protection because it can reveal, or be used to infer, a person's racial or ethnic origin. The brand that built its identity on seeing people now operates an AI system that sees them in ways consumers may not fully understand.

That is not a contradiction of Fenty's mission. But it is a responsibility that comes with it, and one the broader fashion and beauty industry has not yet fully reckoned with.

Conversational commerce has arrived

Last spring, Fenty Beauty launched "Rose Amber," an AI-powered beauty advisor built for WhatsApp, marking the brand's first formal partnership with the platform in the U.S. The experience lets users chat directly with the brand to receive product recommendations, tutorials and reviews in a conversational format.