Skip to main content

What is a 'smart' curling iron?

A composite image of Beauty, Hacked host Jennimai trying a smart curling iron.

These days, smart beauty tech is all the rage. You can convince anybody that your technology is super advanced just by slapping the word "smart" in front of it — so we set out to figure out what it actually means to use smart tech, particularly in the beauty realm.

The T3 Curl ID curling iron is one of these smart beauty devices. It's a curling iron that uses a unique "HeatID" technology to diagnose your hair's specific needs when it comes to heat level. Users input personal details like hair texture, color treatment history, and chemical treatment history to help the device determine an optimal heat level from nine options before using the curler to style their hair. Once you input this data, the iron will heat up to a specific heat setting, and then the curling experience should be pretty familiar.

Bottom half of a white curling iron with rose gold accents being held.
The lit up icons serve as the buttons to input your hair data. Credit: T3Micro

In trying to find out if smart hair tech is actually useful, we need to zoom out on what smart tech actually is. The term "smart" is a little hard to pin down. Most people think of smart tech as something you can control via voice commands or Bluetooth, like an Amazon Alexa device or a Google Nest thermostat. These are smart devices, but are more specifically smart-connected devices — they're connected to a network that allows users to communicate with them from a distance.

To be simply "smart," devices need only to have "some automation and can be easily programmed through an intuitive user interface," according to Petra's blog. In the case of the T3 Curl ID, there's no connectivity. But what makes it smart is the user interface, which includes a mildly intuitive touch button setup that then automates the heat setting used for styling.

So yes, it seems that this curling iron meets the criteria to be smart, and by automating the heat setting, it could potentially make healthier heat styling much more attainable for its users. But does it actually work? Is it hard to figure out? What do your curls actually end up looking like when you use the automated heat settings? Tune in to this episode of Beauty, Hacked to find out as Jennimai tests out the T3 Curl ID and compares it to her regular ol' curler (that she may or may not have had since middle school.)



from Mashable https://ift.tt/N7CTJkZ
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Nintendo Switch has been the US’s bestselling console for 23 straight months

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge It’s been a good two years for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, the gaming tablet has been the bestselling console in the US for 23 straight months. And according to data from the NPD Group, it just had its best October ever, moving 735,926 units of both the Switch and Switch Lite in the US. The company says that represents a 136 percent increase compared to last year. To date, the Switch has sold 22.5 million units in the US, and last week Nintendo revealed that more than 68 million units have been sold globally . “We’re excited about our momentum,” says Nick Chavez, Nintendo of America’s SVP of sales and marketing. Chavez puts the company’s big October down to two main factors. One is a better supply of stock; this year in particular, it’s often been hard to find a Switch on store shelves. This has only been exacerbated by increased demand due to a combination of the pandemic and the breakout success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons . ...

Instagram accidentally reinstated Pornhub’s banned account

After years of on-and-off temporary suspensions, Instagram permanently banned Pornhub’s account in September. Then, for a short period of time this weekend, the account was reinstated. By Tuesday, it was permanently banned again. “This was done in error,” an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we’ve said previously, we permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies.” Instagram’s content guidelines prohibit  nudity and sexual solicitation . A Pornhub spokesperson told TechCrunch, though, that they believe the adult streaming platform’s account did not violate any guidelines. Instagram has not commented on the exact reasoning for the ban, or which policies the account violated. It’s worrying from a moderation perspective if a permanently banned Instagram account can accidentally get switched back on. Pornhub told TechCrunch that its account even received a notice from Instagram, stating that its ban had been a mistake (that message itse...

MVP versus EVP: Is it time to introduce ethics into the agile startup model?

Anand Rao Contributor Share on Twitter Anand Rao is global head of AI at PwC . The rocket ship trajectory of a startup is well known: Get an idea, build a team and slap together a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of users. However, today’s startups need to reconsider the MVP model as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become ubiquitous in tech products and the market grows increasingly conscious of the ethical implications of AI augmenting or replacing humans in the decision-making process. An MVP allows you to collect critical feedback from your target market that then informs the minimum development required to launch a product — creating a powerful feedback loop that drives today’s customer-led business. This lean, agile model has been extremely successful over the past two decades — launching thousands of successful startups, some of which have grown into billion-dollar companies. However, building high-performing product...