Aetrium: skincare guided by face analysis technology

The storefront can say anything it likes about a price or a stock level. The backend does not believe it. Every cart is quoted again on the server, prices are kept in whole cents, and an order is a snapshot of what was true at the moment of checkout.

Checkout is a single transaction: stock is deducted, the coupon is consumed, the line items are frozen and the confirmation email is queued. A client-generated key makes it safe to retry, so a double tap or a flaky connection never produces two orders. The email goes out after the commit, so a mail problem can never roll back a paid order.

Around that core sits what a shop team needs every day: a separate admin for orders, products, bundles, promotions, vendors and categories, an audit trail on every order change, and stock that bundles share instead of double counting. Payment status, fulfilment status and payment method are separate fields with centralised transitions, so a payment provider can be added later without rewriting orders.

The Aetrium Index starts from one guided photo. A face landmark model runs in the browser, so the first step happens on the device: it checks that there is one face, that it is the right distance away, that the head is straight, and that light and sharpness are good enough. It keeps the best of three frames.

From that frame the face is split into six zones: forehead, both cheeks, nose and both under-eye areas. Per zone the app measures colour evenness and visible redness in a perceptual colour space, shine in the T-zone, the brightness difference under the eyes and texture. A separate five-question barrier check asks how the skin feels and stays outside the score.

Lines, pores and spots are graded 1 to 10 against a fixed written rubric, and only if the person opts in. Four small crops go to a vision model three times and the median is kept. Without that step the app falls back to its own estimates and says so on the result. Photos are not stored. Scores are kept on the device, not in an account.

The result page is the report: the photo with its zones, the Index and what changed since the baseline, a card per metric, the barrier check, and plain statements of what the scan cannot see and when to see a doctor. The weights and the method are disclosed on the page itself.

The protocol connects the numbers to the shop. A concern below 70 points to one product by its reference code: lines to the retinal serum, tone and spots to vitamin C, pores to niacinamide, under-eyes to the caffeine eye cream. Rules keep it sensible: at most three actives, one retinoid, vitamin C in the morning and retinal at night, sunscreen whenever actives are used, and a pause on actives if the barrier check comes back irritated. Supplements sit in their own group and are never triggered by a score. The page loads the live catalogue and adds the whole routine to the bag in one step.

We wrote the product line, the claims rules and the design system alongside the software. The line is fifteen products in three ranges of five (serums, moisture, supplements) plus five bundles, each with a permanent reference code, the ingredient and concentration on the label, and no secret blends.

The voice is calm and lab-note: short sentences, numbers instead of adjectives. Claims follow EU cosmetics rules and authorised supplement wording only, and the excluded ingredients are written down. The design system, Calibrated, uses frosted glass, a mist-to-taupe ground and measurement graphics as the only ornament, set in Inter Tight and IBM Plex Mono.