Cosmo AI Review: AI Hair, Makeup & Face Editing on Your Phone

With the invention and popular adoption of AI comes time-saving convenience. But more than that, AI can also provide risk-free testing of new products and looks.

This is particularly true when it comes to anything related to hair and beauty.

Gone are the days of “hair regret” – when an expensive trip to the salon ends in misery because the style that looked so good on the model didn’t end up suiting your face. You get stuck with that unflattering look for the next three months while it grows out.

As a photographer, I see the value of AI in this context: the idea that you can try out looks without risking a bad haircut in real life.

The same can be said of intricate make-overs that use lots of skin products, makeup, and fake lashes; anything that allows you to “try-before-you-buy” has got to be a good thing.

The question, however, is how well do AI tools actually work? Let’s take a look at one popular option: Cosmo AI.

What Does Cosmo AI Offer?

Firstly, let’s address something slightly confusing: in the Apple App Store, this app is called Cosmo: AI Editor, Hair Filters. On Google Play, it’s listed as Hair Editor, Face Filter.

As far as I can tell, the functionality is the same.

So, what is it? Cosmo AI is a beauty app that’s designed to offer users a risk-free environment to try out different looks, predominantly focusing on hairstyles.

It allows you to change the color, shape, and style of your hair by utilizing a range of AI filters.

You can also make other changes to your face; it has filters and editors for your teeth, eyebrows, and makeup, as well as editing options for face shape and size.

Although somewhat female-centric, the app also has features for men, allowing you to experiment with hair, glasses, and beards to create the ultimate selfies.

It’s all done via your phone or compatible tablet, and the app is available with a free three-day trial on both iOS and Android platforms.

After downloading, you answer a few simple questions about what you’re looking to achieve, before taking a selfie or uploading one you already have on your phone.

The app is developed by Spark Dynamic and is part of a suite of similar AI-driven apps produced by the company. They claim the core goal of the app is to bridge the gap between curiosity and commitment by allowing users to accurately visualize drastic hairstyle changes in a “try-before-you-buy” situation, before ever visiting the salon.

Bold claims indeed, but how does it hold up to scrutiny? How accurately does the AI engine render changes, and does it do everything the makers claim?

• More: Best AI Image Editing Apps to Try Now

Review

For this review, I’ve used a stock image of a portrait shot of a woman with long hair, and I’ve used the app on iOS on an iPhone 14.

I’ve tested out the hairstyle filters and the face-change filters, experimenting with face shape, size, and age filters, putting the app through its paces to see how well the AI renders the changes.

I also tested out the various makeup filters, covering everything from lipstick to eyeliner and foundation.

Read on to discover what I thought of the app, how easy it was for me to navigate and use it, and what issues I came across.

Image Upload

As I mentioned above, you can either take a selfie or upload one you’ve already taken on your phone.

For this review, I’ve selected a clean head-on portrait shot of a female model, without obvious makeup, and with neutral lighting and background.

I deliberately chose an image with long hair where the hair loses definition at the ends because AI sometimes struggles to analyze and cleanly render hair when it’s a little “flyaway.” I felt this would be a good test for the app, rooting out any pitfalls and problems it might have.

Before I could upload my image, I needed to choose a subscription plan.

The least expensive is the yearly plan at US$99, with the monthly plan coming in at US$17.99 per month.

There’s a three-day trial with each, and you can cancel subscriptions anytime (keep in mind there are no refunds), avoiding those frustrating auto-renewals.

Hairstyles

Once the image was uploaded, I was presented with four main options: AI Filters, Hair, Enhance, and Body.

First, I chose the Hair set of filters and started to experiment with some of the options available.

There are several options to choose from, including multiple colors, lengths, and styles like wavy, straight, and even dreadlocks.

I tried out the “Red Pink” option and found it gave a good approximation of what it might look like if the model had this color treatment applied to their hair.

On first impressions, I was impressed by how quickly the app renders a change of hairstyle. It looks pretty real, sits well on the head, and gives a decent impression of what it might look like if you really went and got that cut.

However, as I suspected, the app does struggle with rendering the ends of the hair, as you can see by the screenshots. The AI hasn’t been able to clean up the ends of the hair from the original image, leaving digital artifacts that make it almost look like the model has hairy arms.

In each instance, the rendering was the same. Although this doesn’t detract from understanding how a particular haircut might look, it certainly isn’t good enough for creating a selfie to post on social media.

• More: Best Apps for Changing Hair Colors

Face Filter

Next up, I tried out the Face filter options that allow you to play around with the face, jaw, nose, and eyes, changing the size and width, amongst other things.

I found that the face size adjustment, from minimum to maximum, was very subtle and remained realistic, but perhaps that’s only because it didn’t really change very much.

I’m not too sure how useful this is in reality; it could perhaps enhance a selfie slightly, but that’s really all it would be for.

Side-by-side, from narrowest to widest setting, is really the only way you can notice differences from the original image, which sits midway between the two images.

Enhance

The Enhance filter has two options: Soft Touch and Beautify.

I found that Soft Touch worked well as a quick overall filter that smoothed the skin, averaged out the tone, slightly removed some wrinkles and lines in the face, and generally brightened up the image itself.

This is a good go-to filter for a quick “clean-up” that would enable you to improve any image with one click. It takes only a few seconds, and the image remains natural-looking to my eye.

This would be useful for any selfies before posting them on social media, and might also be useful for work headshots, applying a subtle set of adjustments across multiple images to unify the look of a team of employees.

The Beautify filter, on the other hand, did very little worthy of mention, and I feel as though you can do without it.

The Soft Touch does everything it needs to do as a basic starting point, from which you could then go on to apply Looks or Makeup filters.

AI Filters

The AI filters section of the app gives you several options to play with, organized into categories:

• Age
• Beauty
• Skin
• Smile
• Gender
• Glasses

First, I tried Youth under the Age heading. The AI did a good job of taking somewhere in the region of 10 years off the age of the model’s face, removing wrinkles, smoothing the tone of the skin, and making the face slightly narrower and more teardrop-shaped to my eye.

I feel like this worked well and looked quite natural. I’m sure it would be useful for quickly editing photos for publishing or printing.

Next up, I tried out One-Tap Makeup, which is one of the better filters under the Beauty tab.

The AI very quickly transformed the face with a complete basic makeover. I’m sure this would be something that could be used to experiment with makeup ideas or to enhance a selfie before posting it on social.

Skin

The Skin tab section contains various filters from Radiance to Tanned, Eye Bag Remover, Botox, and more.

These are all essentially variations on a theme, using the same filter with different settings, and I found many of them to be very similar; the differences seemed too subtle, and it was difficult for me to detect much change from the original image upload.

The Freckles filter offered noticeable changes to the complexion of the model’s face, albeit subtly, as well as some small green dots on the forehead and near the nose, which were obviously some kind of digital noise artifacts left from the AI processing.

These would need to be cleaned up before the image could be used for anything.

I also found that the No Eyebags filter did a good job of removing the under-eye bags and wrinkles. The image remained natural to my eye – even at 100% filter level – and the majority of the other skin filters are variations on other filters that are all achievable manually, too.

The “Tanned” filter worked OK, but really just looked like a very basic tone adjustment that could easily be done with any filter on a phone or social media platform.

Smile

I was quite impressed with the Smile filter; the AI made fast and light work of what is a significant transformation from straight mouth to full smile with teeth imagined and rendered very realistically.

I liked how the wrinkles, muscles, and contours all seemed to have been added naturally, in exactly the way I would imagine the face should look if the model actually smiled.

I could see changes in the eyes, a lifting of the cheeks, and the introduction of lines around the top corners of the mouth. This is my favorite of all the filters I tested.

• More: Best AI Image Generators for iPhone & Android

Makeup

If you want to get into the detailed individual edits and really take your time to create and edit all the elements yourself, the Makeup set of filters allows you to drill down and manually adjust lipstick, blush, eyeliner, eye shadow, contour, smoothness, and more.

There’s a multitude of colors that you can combine and play around with, adjusting the filter levels of each element until you get exactly what you’re looking for.

I imagine this could be useful for trying out ideas before spending money on products at the store.

Many of the presets are really just automatic versions of the manual makeup filters, combined to create pre-determined looks.

This is where it feels as though there are perhaps too many presets; the app could potentially offer a cheaper subscription with fewer of these, and you would still be able to achieve most of the same results.

Looks

The Looks section of filters, similar to the One-Tap Makeup filter, is a group of presets that give you a fun way of very quickly trying out different looks.

There are different themes like ’80s, Prom Night, Artpop, etc., making it another fun way of using the app to try out ideas and get some inspiration ahead of your next night out.

Some of the filters aren’t very realistic, like a collage with stars and colored bands that unnaturally stray into the hair, almost like stickers you might see on social media filter apps.

Gender

We’ve all seen those face swap apps that put your Mom’s face onto your Dad’s body to hilarious effect, and Cosmo AI offers that with the Gender filter, which lets you swap an image from male to female, or female to male.

This could be something fun, in my opinion, and in trying it out, I found the AI couldn’t render out the long hair properly, again leaving digital noise artifacts from the original image.

There were also issues with the background, and I could see part of a different colored top that didn’t blend into the female’s vest top from the original.

• More: These Are The Best AI Object Removers

Final Thoughts on Cosmo AI

Fundamentally, Cosmo AI is excellent for trying out different hairstyles and looks, minimizing the risk of expensive trips to the salon with bad results.

The hairstyles are where it comes into its own, and the app is worthy of download for that alone.

In essence, Cosmo AI has a lot to offer; maybe too much, in fact. From one-touch AI filters to filters for makeup, skin, and smile, each section of the app has plenty for you to get into, but many of the filters under each category seem to be a bit superfluous and very similar to other filters in other categories.

For most individuals, Cosmo AI may not be worth the US$99 per year subscription, as a slimmed-down version with fewer individual filters at a lower cost would work better.

That being said, if you’re a hairdresser or beautician, I can see having the app installed on a tablet to show clients potential styles and looks.