Procter and Gamble’s Opte wand is like a real

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

You’re never going to be the tall, willowy model with perfect skin whose hair always dazzles in slow motion as you spin it through the air — because there's no slow-motion cameraman following you around, if for no other reason.

But though many beauty products promise seemingly impossible results, there may actually be a magic wand you could wave to restore some of the natural-looking beauty of your skin, according to attendees at CES 2019.

It's called the Opté Precision Skincare System, and what it promises actually sounds plausible with today's technology — a gadget that can detect the color and pigmentation of your skin, spot blemishes, and precisely apply tiny jets of the exact right color makeup to those blemishes, without affecting the rest of your skin at all.

According to a press release, the wand is basically a really fancy handheld thermal inkjet printer with 120 nozzles, plus a camera that captures 200 pictures of your skin each second, that deposits 1 billionth of a liter of makeup on each skin spot it detects.

The result looks more like those skin-smoothing beauty filters in your camera app than traditional makeup — only here, people in the real world get to see the effect on your actual face as well. Journalists at the BBC and VentureBeat applied it to their own faces and seemed impressed with the results. (The BBC calls it a "skin printer"; it is not a skin printer, but that is also a thing.)

There are still plenty of questions to ask before we say the Opté actually works and truly makes sense, like: how much will this device and its specialized makeup cost? (Procter and Gamble is calling the makeup formula "Opté Precision Serum," which makes it sound like a lot). Supposedly, P&G will offer darker versions of the serum for darker skin as well.

The Cincinnati Business Courier does report that the moisturizing and UV-protecting serum should last all day unless you wash your face, refills should last two months, and that we should see the product in early 2020 — though by the looks of this website and this video, it may already be a thing in Hong Kong.

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