Evaluation of Perception Through Fashion and Food Adjacencies for the Cosmetics Industry

Due to the highly competitive market, brands struggle to understand consumer thinking and the impact of multisensory experiences on purchasing decisions. Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient. Insight-driven innovation enables brands to uncover the real motivations behind behavior, build authentic connections and create disruptive solutions. The key industry challenge is developing new methodologies capable of capturing consumer insights in more meaningful, differentiated ways that drive strategic growth and competitive advantage globally.

Figure 1 - Consumer insight processCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

Quiñones defines an insight as a non-obvious revelation about how consumers think, feel, or behave, with strong potential to enhance communication, branding, and innovation strategies. Insights have historically reshaped entire industries. The process of discovering them involves three phases (see Figure 1): conducting in-depth consumer interviews, analyzing the collected information and uncovering hidden patterns and emotions. A well-known example from the cosmetics industry in the early 2000s revealed that “only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful, and just 5% felt attractive¹.”

The cosmetics industry increasingly requires innovative and disruptive methodologies to generate deep consumer insights and create relevant value propositions that shape the sector’s future. Artificial Intelligence has become a key ally in developing new approaches to insight generation. According to insightaceanalytic.com, the global AI beauty and cosmetics market reached about $4.43 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $9.19 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 20.4%. This article introduces a new explicit evaluation methodology that uses AI-generated stimuli to assess perception, enabling the capture of insights in a novel, differentiated and more effective way.

Implicit Innovation versus Explicit Innovation

Explicit methods gather conscious and declared consumer opinions, while implicit methods reveal unconscious emotions, associations, and motivations that truly influence the perception and choice of cosmetic brands. Table 1 presents the differences between these two methodologies in the cosmetics industry.

Novelties in Projective Testing

Projective tests are a form of explicit technique for gathering information, where subjects are presented with stimuli to reveal unconscious thoughts and feelings by having the participants “project” onto them (hence, the name). These tests have been widely used in different industries and can help brands with effective marketing, brand positioning and product innovation, among others. The most common techniques are completion, association, construction, expressive and choice-ordering (see Figure 2). 

Figure 2 - Projective TestsCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

An illustrative example in the cosmetics industry involves using a completion technique to explore consumer perceptions of a personal care product containing olive oil. Although participants did not physically test the product, as the study was conducted online, they associated it with a sticky texture and an unpleasant odor due to the oil ingredient. These findings demonstrate how projective techniques can effectively reveal preconceived beliefs and expectations. Such methods are valuable tools for evaluating potential market impact and consumer acceptance of new product launches.

In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence has increased significantly across many fields, including projective testing. AI enables real-time data analysis and the extraction of meaningful insights that support consumer understanding and innovation. Technologies such as Facial Expression Recognition or EEG, when combined with projective tests, provide valuable information for strategic decision-making. Additionally, AI can analyze narratives from storytelling tests, identifying patterns and subtle emotions that human researchers may overlook.

Another example is the use of virtual reality in projective tests. Jyothula and Johnson developed a VR-based version of Zaltman’s Metaphor Elicitation Technique, replacing traditional images with 3D objects in an immersive virtual environment. This approach allows participants to express emotions and thoughts through embodied interaction. Their findings show that immersion and presence enhance sense-making and deepen emotional expression². Such a disruptive technique offers cosmetic brands a powerful tool for uncovering hidden insights and deeper truths about products and services.

Ekman's Theory of Emotions

Paul Ekman's theory of basic emotions is a fundamental pillar for understandingFigure 3 - Ekman's six basic emotionsCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez how brands can interpret consumers' emotional reactions. Ekman identified six involuntary, unconscious and universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise, which are expressed similarly across different cultures through facial microexpressions. These microexpressions are involuntary movements that reveal a person's true emotional state, even when they are trying to hide it.

Within the cosmetics industry, this framework enables the evaluation of user satisfaction by analyzing facial expressions. Tools such as eye-tracking and facial recognition can detect emotional responses during product trials, offering more objective data than traditional surveys. This method aligns with emerging approaches that combine psychology, neuroscience, and marketing to assess product effectiveness beyond clinical measures like skin hydration or wrinkle reduction.

Innovation is a key driver of competitiveness in the cosmetics industry, as consumers increasingly seek efficacy, safety and differentiation. A promising but underutilized path lies in leveraging adjacencies from other sectors, particularly fashion and food. By looking beyond traditional industry boundaries, cosmetic brands can adopt new ideas, technologies and narratives, enabling the creation of distinctive innovations that resonate more strongly with modern consumers.

Methods and Results

AI-powered Stimulus Generation for Explicit Testing

For the present study, the stimuli consisted of images inspired by adjacencies from the fashion and gastronomy industries (see Figure 4 and Figure 5), as well as short poems drawn from the literary domain (see Table 2). All stimuli were generated using an artificial intelligence tool and were designed to represent the six basic emotions. To ensure this, carefully structured prompts were required. The parameters used to construct these prompts are outlined below.

Figure 4 - Fashion images created with AI as stimuli for the six basic emotionsCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

Figure 5 - Food images created with AI stimuli for the six basic emotionsCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

Prompt Example

For the project, a total of 36 distinct prompts were developed. One example is as follows: “Create an image of a haute couture dress designed to evoke fear, featuring a dramatic, asymmetrical and unsettling silhouette that conveys tension and unease. Use dark tones such as black, smoky gray, and petrol blue, complemented by metallic or translucent accents. Materials should include vinyl, leather, torn tulle, or semi-opaque structures that suggest both fragility and restraint. The model should adopt a neutral posture and display a completely expressionless face, free of emotional cues. The background should depict a minimalist runway with no decorative elements, softly illuminated with diffused lighting to highlight the dress’s texture while maintaining an introspective and elegant atmosphere.” 

Generation of Surveys and Psychological Validation

The projection test was developed using three surveys, each one consisting of the different visual stimuli generated. In each of the surveys, the panelists were asked to evaluate their face or hair, observe it for 30 seconds and think about what they liked and disliked, and also what the main features they identified were. The general structure of the survey can be seen in Table 3. 

The surveys were designed and administered online using the Google Forms platform. To ensure the psychological validity of the study, they were reviewed by a professional psychologist, who assessed both the appropriateness of the language and the emotional congruence of the images. This approach enabled the evaluation of the relationship between emotions and aesthetic perception from a multisensory perspective, offering a novel and disruptive methodology for explicit evaluation in the cosmetics field.

Design and Application of the Projective Test

In the surveys, participants were first asked to report their age and their perceived hair type (according to Andre Walker’s hair typing system) or their skin phototype (according to the Fitzpatrick scale). Afterward, they were encouraged to use a mirror and, while observing their reflection, touch their face or hair. This multisensory interaction allowed participants to more accurately assess the condition of their skin or hair. Once this self-assessment was completed, participants were asked to view (or read) the generated stimuli and select the option that best matched the appearance of their skin or hair. Finally, they were asked to explain the reason behind their choice and to identify the main concern they had regarding their skin or hair. A summary of the overall procedure is presented in Figure 6.

Results and Discussion

In the first hair survey, a noteworthy finding emerges: happiness - being the only positive emotion - is reported in just 25.2% of responses. This indicates that most women in the panel are dissatisfied with the condition or appearance of their hair and tend to experience feelings of discomfort. Among the issues reported, hair loss is the most frequent concern, affecting 34.3% of participants, followed by frizz at 29.4%.

Most panelists report feeling anger when assessing the condition of their facial skin. This emotional response is closely linked to the three most prevalent dermatological concerns among Colombian women: blemishes and uneven skin tone (29.8%), enlarged pores and sensitive skin (14.4%) and oily skin (11.5%).

Several studies support this relationship, showing that conditions such as melasma and hyperpigmentation can lead to elevated levels of frustration and even depression among women in countries such as Colombia and Brazil^3,4. This helps explain why facial skin is often regarded as a key component of personal identity; any visible imperfection may trigger feelings of shame or dissatisfaction, which can in turn manifest as anger.

A clear discrepancy emerges when compared with the findings of the two previous surveys. In this case, participants associated the condition of their hair more strongly with happiness (52%). These results appear to be closely linked to cultural factors and to the way the test was administered. Research has shown that, in Latin American cultures, women tend to process and retain information more effectively through visual stimuli than through textual ones. This is supported by Elisabeth Gruber et al., who found that the beauty ideals adopted by Latin American women are strongly shaped by visual messages rather than written content⁵. For this reason, we do not recommend using text-based stimuli, such as poetry, to conduct projective tests in cosmetic perception studies. 

Comparison with Tests of Other Adjacencies

Figure 7 - Comparison with previously published projective testsCourtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

Figure 7 presents a comparison between the results obtained from the projective tests using fashion dresses and desserts and those reported in previous studies that employed works of art. In those earlier studies, the selection of stimuli was also conducted under psychological supervision and supported by bibliographic references. As shown in Figure 8, the results demonstrate reproducibility in the emotions of happiness - remaining consistently between 20% and 26% - and sadness, which also shows stable values between 18% and 20%. These findings reinforce the idea that working with adjacencies from other industries can be a valuable approach for generating meaningful consumer insights.

Figure 8 - Comparative graph of emotions between trials. Courtesy of Cubillos, Garbica, Jiménez

Conclusion

One of the major opportunities for the cosmetics industry is to drive innovation by leveraging knowledge and methodologies from adjacent industries. Based on the analysis of the collected data, several key insights emerged for the study population:

• Only 25% of people feel satisfied with the condition of their hair.
• 12% of people report feeling sad about the state of their hair.
• Only 26% of people feel happy with the appearance of their skin.
• 18% of people feel sad about the appearance of their skin.

The methodology used - drawing on adjacencies from other industries such as fashion and food - produces results that are comparable to those of previous studies evaluating basic emotions, particularly happiness and sadness. This demonstrates that such cross‑industry approaches represent a significant innovation opportunity for the cosmetics sector, offering a promising source of new explicit evaluation methodologies.

References

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