Accessible Makeup

Makeup and cosmetics offer the potential for self-reinvention and reshaping of social roles for visually impaired people. However, there exist barriers to conducting a beauty regime because of the reliance on visual information and color variances in makeup. We present a content analysis of 145 YouTube videos to demonstrate visually impaired individuals’ unique practices before, during, and after doing makeup. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 visually impaired people to uncover their perceptions of and challenges with the makeup process. Overall, our findings on unique practices of how visually impaired people do makeup (e.g., how to differentiate makeup products) illuminate challenges in the learning process, task completion, and acquisition of feedback. The existing challenges provide opportunities for future research to address learning barriers, the lack of sufficient feedback, and inaccessible product details, making the experience of doing makeup more accessible to people with visual impairments