Hack Your Body With Cosmetics
Beauty Technology
Prof. Katia Vega (PER)
Beauty Tech Designer & Professor at UTEC
Katia Vega is a Beauty Tech Designer. Inspired by invisible computing and wearables, she proposes novel ways to move from traditional to interactive cosmetics. She invented Beauty Technology: cosmetics embedded with electronics that transform the body into an interface. Currently, she is a professor at UTEC (Peru). Katia was a postdoc at the Responsive Environments Group at MIT Media Lab (USA). She got her PhD and master degree at PUC-Rio (Brazil) and received a BS from UNMSM (Peru). She was a Research Assistant at HKBU (Hong Kong). Her work has been covered by New Scientist, Wired, Discovery, CNN, PSFK and others.
Beauty Technology discusses how to transform conventional cosmetics into seamless, interactive interfaces
Beauty Technology is a way to use cosmetics and electronics to make your body an interface. My goal is to create a symbiosis between the human body and devices, making technology invisible to amplify human capabilities.
Summary
- Beauty Technology integrates electronics into cosmetics like hair, nails, and makeup to transform the human body into a functional interface for seamless device interaction.
- Conductive hair extensions act as touch sensors, allowing users to discreetly trigger actions like recording audio or sending emergency alerts through natural hair-tossing gestures.
- Embedding RFID tags and magnets into fingernails enables contactless interactions, such as making payments, controlling musical interfaces, or manipulating digital devices.
- Interactive makeup and eyelashes detect blinking to control external hardware, providing restorative independence for individuals with physical disabilities to manage their environment.
- The next frontier of beauty technology involves biosensing tattoos that use reactive inks to monitor internal health data, such as glucose levels, by changing color on the skin.
Article
Hack Your Body With Cosmetics
Beauty Technology And The Future Of Interactive Body Interfaces
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Prof. Katia Vega stood before an audience in Sweden and asked a question that sounded at once playful, radical and faintly unsettling: what if cosmetics stopped being merely decorative and began acting as interfaces?
Her presentation, titled *Hack Your Body With Cosmetics*, unfolded less like a conventional technology talk than a glimpse into a near future already pressing against the skin. Vega, a Peruvian beauty tech designer and professor at UTEC, described a field she helped invent, Beauty Technology, in which hair, nails, eyelashes, eyeliner and even tattoos became conduits between the body and the digital world.
“The functionality of cosmetics hasn't changed much since the time of our grandmothers,” Vega said. “We use them to look prettier, but the next step is using them to transform the body into a functional interface.”
A Body That Could Click, Blink And Signal
The proposition was deceptively simple. The body already moved through habits so instinctive they were nearly invisible: a hand rising to touch hair, a blink, a tap of the fingernail, the lifting of an eyebrow. Vega’s work asked what would happen if those unconscious gestures were given computational meaning.
“What if we use our unconscious behaviors consciously for activating different devices?” she said. “We can give actions like touching your hair or blinking a new meaning to interact with the world around us.”
In Vega’s vision, a blink could turn on a light. A touch to the hair could begin recording audio or trigger an emergency alert. A fingernail could pay a transit fare. A face could become a controller. Skin itself could serve as a living dashboard.
It was a vision rooted not in bulky headsets or conspicuous gadgets, but in invisibility. Unlike watches, wristbands or screens that announced themselves as devices, Beauty Technology aimed to disappear into ordinary adornment.
Hairware And The Politics Of Secrecy
Among the most striking examples was Hairware, conductive hair extensions created through a chemical metallisation process. The treated strands still resembled hair, but functioned as touch sensors, capable of connecting by Bluetooth to a smartphone.
Vega described hair as both public and private, something exposed to the world yet deeply personal. It was also expressive. People touched it while thinking, flirting, fidgeting, stalling, retreating. Hair, in other words, was already a language.
“Imagine that you could have eyelashes that turn on the lights when you blink, or hair that you touch to record a conversation,” Vega said. “This is a way to use your body as a portal to interact with the digital world.”
That promise contained a quiet tension. A technology hidden in the body could be intimate and protective, as in moments of danger when discreetly sending a help message might matter. But it could also raise difficult questions about consent and surveillance. During the question session, audience members pressed Vega on privacy and the social implications of such invisible interfaces. She acknowledged the concern directly: if the body became a recording device, others might never know.
That exchange revealed the double edge of seamlessness. The more natural technology became, the harder it might be to see.
Fingernails That Paid, Played And Performed
If hair carried the drama of secrecy, fingernails offered delight. Vega embedded tiny RFID tags into acrylic nails, turning each fingertip into a contactless tool. In one application, the nails could be used for payments on public transport. In another, each nail became a musical note.
The effect was both whimsical and conceptually sharp. A hand lifted into the air could become a piano. A dip of the fingers into water could trigger sound changes in a project Vega called Aquadiging, effectively transforming an aquarium into a DJ controller.
The work blurred distinctions between body ornament and machine input, but also between performance and utility. Here was a manicure that was not simply stylish, but programmable. Here was beauty reimagined as infrastructure.
Vega noted that some of these tools were already accessible enough for non-specialists to try, particularly RFID nails, which could be assembled with readily available components. True to her academic instincts, she emphasised openness over commercial enclosure, sharing methods rather than treating them as proprietary magic.
Blinking As Command
There was perhaps no stronger emblem of Vega’s approach than the eye. With metallised fake eyelashes and conductive eyeliner, she created systems that could detect blinking and translate it into control signals for computers, connected devices and even drones.
Blinkifier, one of her early projects, transformed blinking into an expressive trigger for light patterns. Elsewhere, Vega demonstrated a drone navigated by eyelid movements, leaning into the comic-book metaphor she used throughout the talk: the body upgraded not into something monstrous, but something heroic.
Yet beneath the theatrical flourish lay a serious principle. Human gestures that had never counted as technical input could be reclassified as command. The body did not need to learn the machine’s language. The machine could learn the body’s.
Technology As Independence
The most powerful moment of the presentation came when Vega moved from experimental design to disability and autonomy. She recounted meeting Felipe, a former Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion living with severe physical impairment. He told her that tasks many people considered trivial, such as turning on the television or changing channels, could take him half an hour.
Out of that encounter came Winkymote, an assistive system using second-skin sensors to detect facial gestures and translate them into infrared commands for a television.
“There is no better way to empower people than by giving them the superpower of changing a channel or turning on a light through their own body, providing a life-changing sense of independence,” Vega said.
It was the point at which the language of superheroes ceased to sound whimsical. Beauty Technology was not merely about novelty, spectacle or even convenience. In the right context, it was about restoring agency.
A blink, which in one demonstration could fly a drone, in another could return a sliver of self-determination to someone whose environment had become inaccessible.
Skin As Interface, Skin As Canvas
Vega’s work also extended beyond hair and nails into skin-based systems. Projects such as Kinesi used special-effects makeup and sensors to read muscle movements in the face, allowing users to control light or other outputs through smiles, winks and raised brows. Another project, Chromoskin, used thermochromic inks and circuits to create makeup that could change colour dynamically.
This was not only engineering. It was choreography, costume design, chemistry and computing folded together. Vega’s background across computer science, design, electronics, chemistry and art shaped the work’s unusual fluency. The body here was neither just a technical platform nor merely an aesthetic surface. It was both.
Designing such interfaces, she explained, required attention to the stubborn particulars of flesh: skin oiliness, conductivity, placement, comfort, muscle variation. One user could raise a single eyebrow. Another could not. One person’s skin held a sensor cleanly; another’s defeated the adhesive. The body resisted standardisation even as technology sought to read it.
That friction mattered. It was a reminder that innovation on the skin could never be purely abstract. It had to contend with the messy, variable fact of being human.
The Tattooed Future
By the close of the talk, Vega turned to what she described as her next frontier: biosensing tattoos. Instead of conventional tattoo ink, she was experimenting with reactive biosensors that could be placed in the skin and change colour according to internal health data, such as glucose levels.
“I am researching tattoos that use biosensors instead of traditional ink,” she said. “Imagine your skin changing color to notify you of your glucose levels, creating a seamless connection between your body and data.”
It was a startling image: the tattoo not as symbol, memory or ornament, but as living medical display. Not an external monitor, but a biological notification system worn in plain sight.
The idea captured the larger ambition of Beauty Technology. It was not simply to attach devices to the body, but to erase the line between body and device altogether.
Beyond Wearables
What Vega offered at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm was not just a portfolio of curious prototypes. It was a challenge to the prevailing imagination of wearables itself. The dominant model of consumer technology had long assumed an object added to the body: a watch, a band, a headset, glasses. Vega proposed something subtler and more disruptive. Technology, she argued, could reside in the body’s existing surfaces and rituals.
Invisible computing, in her hands, became deeply visible in another sense. It illuminated how much of modern life already passed through coded gestures, presentation and appearance. Cosmetics had always altered perception. Her question was what happened when they began altering function too.
By the end of the session, Beauty Technology no longer sounded like a gimmick from a science-fiction runway. It sounded like a new design philosophy for intimate computing, one with obvious seductions and equally obvious ethical questions.
The future Vega sketched was glamorous, unsettling, ingenious and humane all at once. A future where a blink could switch on a lamp, where a manicure could unlock a payment system, where a strand of hair might call for help, and where skin itself could become the place where data finally learned to feel personal.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm