Makeup Robot: From Greasepaint to ABB Arms

A makeup robot puts foundation, blush or lipstick on a face without a person holding the brush. A few startups say they have built one, and several patents describe how it would work. This post follows the idea from hand-applied greasepaint to airbrushes and desktop printers, then looks at what is being tested today and where ABB cobots such as GoFa and YuMi could fit. Nothing here is a product you can buy this month, so we keep what exists apart from what is still a claim.

A makeup artist works on a client's face, the hand skill a machine has to copy. Photo: Charlie Brewer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How film studios put on makeup by hand

Until recently every face was made up by a person. On film sets that meant a studio artist with brushes, sponges and sticks of greasepaint, working while the star sat between takes. By 1914 Max Factor had perfected a flexible greasepaint for the movies, and he became an authority on makeup for the screen. The work was slow and personal. Each look depended on the artist's eye for light, skin tone and the camera in use, which is exactly what a machine would later have to copy.

Italian actor Amedeo Nazzari with his makeup artist before filming, 1950. Photo: Touring Club Italiano via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Color film made the job harder. Greasepaint was heavy and shiny, and under Technicolor lights actors sweated through it, so artists kept retouching. Factor's answer was Pan-Cake, a water-activated powder applied with a damp sponge and first made for Technicolor. It reached shops in 1937, after a delay while the company built up enough supply for the studios. A thin, even layer laid down quickly is also what an airbrush does.

The Max Factor display inside the Hollywood Museum in Los Angeles. Photo: Jllm06 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The airbrush reached faces early. A 1926 press photograph shows a man holding one close to a woman's cheek, with the air hose trailing behind. Printing came much later. In May 2014 Grace Choi, a former Harvard Business School student, showed a small printer called Mink at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. It turned a color picked on screen into a powder for eye shadow or blush. Mink made the product, though, and the user still had to put it on.

A man holds an airbrush beside a woman's face in a 1926 press photograph. Photo: International Photo via DPLA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What a makeup robot looks like in 2026

The clearest attempt is Gemma Robotics, also called BeautAI, founded in 2022 and based in Texas and Haifa, Israel. It describes the world's first automatic makeup application machine and says a look takes under three minutes. A patent assigned to Beautai describes a camera on a robot arm that maps the face and sprays color through airbrush nozzles. An EU-funded project called BEAUT, coordinated by Gemma from July 2023 to June 2024 with 75,000 euros, aimed at any look in under four minutes using airbrush mechanics and real-time color mixing. A 2024 article still called the company stealth, and no machine on sale turned up in our search.

Airbrush foundation and orange lipstick on makeup artist Patrick Starrr, 2016, the kind of finish a spray machine aims to repeat. Photo: PatrickStarrr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Earlier filings point the same way. A patent by Qiang Li, US 9811717, describes a light projector, a camera and a depth processor that build a 3D model of a face, after which a robot applies cosmetics with a nozzle, brush or pen. South Korea is pushing the wider field. In mid-October 2026 Herald Business reported a government plan for AI beauty services covering skin analysis, custom cosmetics and robot cosmetics, with one licensed manager allowed to oversee several stores that use AI or automated equipment. That plan is about custom products more than face painting, but it shows regulators starting to write rules for machines in beauty shops.

A woman applies red lipstick by hand, a precise move near the lips that a robot must make safely. Photo: Stephencdickson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where does ABB fit? ABB has not announced a makeup machine, and we found no ABB customer building one. Its robots already work around cosmetics, though. At Geka Brush an ABB FlexPicker packs finished mascara caps into boxes, as covered in our post on cosmetics manufacturing. For a face, the likelier fit is a light collaborative arm such as the GoFa CRB 15000, built to work beside people, or the dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 for small, precise payloads. So far that is only a possibility. A related job, coating a small curved surface, appears in nail painting robots.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

What has to be solved before one sits on a vanity

Safety comes first. A nozzle or brush a few centimeters from an eye needs hard limits on force and speed, and a way to stop the moment the head moves. Collaborative arms such as GoFa are designed around force limiting, and ABB's SafeMove software can supervise the speed and position of industrial arms. Engineers would build and test the arm's paths against a model of a head in RobotStudio before any real face is involved. Hair, glasses and a user who sneezes are the cases that break a tidy simulation.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Skill is the second problem. A makeup artist reads skin, lighting and the occasion, and adjusts a look as she works. A machine has a face map and a stored look. Gemma works around the gap by letting artists sell signature looks through a marketplace, so the robot repeats an artist's design instead of inventing one. The BEAUT project also named color matching as a goal, with real-time mixing meant to help women of color who have limited shade options. Whether a stored look suits a face on a given morning has not been tested in public.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Cost and location will decide what comes next. Gemma's platform lets small studios and salons offer applications, so small studios look like the first customers. A home unit could matter most to people with physical disabilities, a group the BEAUT project listed among its targets. Hand makeup is not going away, and film sets will still need artists. Watch for a real price, a safety certificate and an independent test of how even the spray is, since none of these has been published that we could find.

An artist paints temporary airbrush art on a boy's arm at a street fair. Photo: Tomwsulcer / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com