Building a Virtual Try-on Manicure App for COSMO Group’s NEONAIL
The client
COSMO Group leads the nail styling and care market worldwide, with over 2,500 products reaching 38 countries — Poland and, beyond it, Germany and Austria, Spain, Italy, England, the Czech Republic, Greece and South Africa among them.
NEONAIL sits in its portfolio and leads on innovation in the category, with 400 shades of UV gel polish alone, plus a long list of accessories.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
Customers were buying nail products in shops, where they could check a colour against their own hands first. NEONAIL wanted that same certainty available from the sofa.
Challenge 01Colour you can trust on screen
The app had to render coloured nails in real time with a natural, lifelike 3D effect — anything less and the reassurance disappears.
Challenge 02Trying on and buying in one place
An intuitive experience had to connect to the ecommerce platform, so a customer who likes what they see can order it immediately.
Challenge 03Not only the newest phones
It had to run well on a wide range of devices across both iOS and Android, not just the latest iPhone.
What we did
A manicure tried on before it is bought
NEONAIL arrived with the idea; Netguru consulted on it and built the app from scratch, covering everything from project management and user research through product design and development to quality assurance.
Solutions and technologies proposed
The engagement opened with consulting on how to do this at all, then a project roadmap.
Colour transferred convincingly
Computer vision algorithms, machine learning models and augmented reality together produce the lifelike colour transfer, copying colours and patterns onto the user’s own nails with a realistic 3D effect.
Colours, shapes, decorations
Users test a wide range of nail colours, shapes and decorations in real time and bookmark the ones they like.
Straight through to purchase
Favourites can be bought through NEONAIL’s connected ecommerce platform, which is the point of the whole exercise.
Client testimonial
Building our virtual try-on app for manicures, we wanted the most realistic experience possible of testing nail products at home. Creating natural-looking, three-dimensional, colored nails in real time was challenging, so we took on Netguru because of their expertise in cutting edge technology
Tech stackThe tools that made it possible
01
Augmented reality
Placing colour on the user’s own nails, live.
02
Computer vision
The algorithms tracking hands and nails frame by frame.
03
Machine learning
The models behind a colour transfer that survives real lighting.
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What’s next