Good, Clean, Fair (In Progress)
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After about a month after making an, almost entirely inactive, Instagram account, I started to get kind of frustrated. Here I was, continuously getting exposed to marketing campaigns designed to make me feel terrible about my skin. And, when I was ready to take their bait, maybe try to purchase something, I couldn’t find any hard evidence that any of their products were actually worth buying. Digging around on the internet exposed the fact that product testimonials were anecdotal at best, requiring me to read an entire article to reach a final of conclusion: ok so maybe this product worked for the person who wrote it. That’s when I starting thinking. How could we fix this? Were all skincare enthusiast forever cursed with scrolling through unfulfilling Reddit threads and reading contradictory articles of ‘experts’?
I wanted to make a website where we could centralize information in a easy-to-interpret interface. I wanted to help people find the information that mattered to them without the influence of marketing campaigns and empty promises.
Account users fill out a page long survey, providing information about their habits and skincare usage. This way, every time they reviewed a product, we would be able to link this information to their review of the product’s effectiveness. We would also provide a follow up mechanism, making sure that products were reviewed not right after purchase, but once they’d actually been tried.
That’s how I came up with Good, Clean, Fair. The premise was the idea that we could harness the power of crowd sourcing to get large scale information about products. Like Rate-My-Professor but for moisturizer. So much of how we react to products is about external environmental factors: your age, what you eat, which climate you live in, how much sleep you get. This was exactly the information that was totally missing in these testimonials!
This would enable one to create a network of users and analyze their actual needs. The possibilities for this platform are essentially limitless: a social platform - creating skincare pencils, a recommendation system - providing real insight into product similarity, a skincare wikipedia page!
As far as actuating this idea, I spent the summer building a website interface and database structure. As I learn more and more machine learning techniques related to recommendation systems, I hope that I’ll be able to implement a demo of the website and publicize it. Stick around, I’ll keep you posted :).
