Submission for the YouCam API Skin AI & Apparel VTO Hackathon
🔑 For the YouCam judges
Try the app: sign up at tint-kin.vercel.app. During the hackathon every account gets Pro for free: 12 scans, unlimited product checks, 4 simulations, custom-product simulations. No card needed.
Admin portal (read-only): tint-kin.vercel.app/admin
This login is a separate read-only viewer. It shows aggregate metrics and a user list, but on the server:
- emails are masked (
a•••@g•••.com)
- names are cut to an initial
- scores, skin age, birth dates, goals, health answers and photos are never sent
- refunds, tier changes, shop edits and feedback triage are blocked
The owner's admin login is separate and is not in this repo.
Demo video: add the YouTube/Vimeo link here before submitting
💰 Business model
Subscription only. TintKin does not sell products, so its advice stays independent.
| Tier | Price | Includes |
|---|
| Free | $0 | Adaptive plan, guided sessions, 2 scans, 3 product checks, 1 simulation a month |
| Standard | $8/mo | 6 scans, unlimited product checks, 3 simulations |
| Pro | $15/mo | 12 scans, unlimited product checks, 4 simulations, custom-product simulations |
Worst-case YouCam cost is about $3.15 a month for Standard and $5.92 for Pro, which leaves roughly 61% margin before fees. Daily coaching runs on our own engine and costs nothing per use. The full case is in docs/hackathon-pitch.md.
💡 Inspiration
Skin apps give you a score, and then nothing happens. Testers kept asking "what am I getting from just my face result?" Routines found online ignore your skin, your safety (pregnancy, sensitivity), and how your skin reacts in the first weeks. That is exactly when most people quit or irritate their skin.
🚀 What it does
TintKin is a daily skin coach. It works like a workout programme for your skin.
- An optional YouCam baseline before your plan. After onboarding, add a selfie for measured starting scores or continue without a photo. Reliable scans establish a baseline; low-confidence scans are excluded from plan baselines and check-ins. The questionnaire continues to guide routine choices and safety rules.
- A plan built for your skin. A deterministic rules engine turns goals, skin type, phototype and safety answers into a staged plan: barrier care first, then one new active at a time. Pregnancy, "unsure" and sensitive skin are hard safety gates.
- Guided daily sessions. Morning and evening sessions come with step cards, timers, voice guidance and a reason for every step.
- Actives on a ladder. Retinoids run 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 nights a week, and acids 1 → 2 → 3. A step goes up a rung only after 14 calm days with 70% of its sessions done.
- Adapts when your skin reacts. After each session you tap Fine, Tingled, Irritated or Breakout. Irritation means three barrier-only days, then a restart one rung lower. A second reaction to the same ingredient swaps that step for a gentler one.
- Progress you can trust.
- A one-tap mirror check each day. Feeling better on 5 of the last 7 days earns a YouCam scan to measure it.
- Photo quality is checked before scoring, and low-confidence scans are marked.
- Plan-aware product check. Paste an ingredient list or snap the label. TintKin tells you what the product does, which of your goals it serves, whether it clashes with your plan, and anything to avoid for your profile.
- What-If simulator. See your own photo after a year of the routine.
- Kin. A companion who talks you through it and celebrates small wins. Matching static artwork keeps Kin recognizable while its animation loads.
💻 How we built it
TintKin is built on a modern, highly performant full-stack architecture:
- Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React, Tailwind CSS, JavaScript with JSDoc checks.
- Backend & Storage: Vercel for serverless execution, Cloudinary for secure and dynamic image processing, and MongoDB Atlas for structured user and historical data storage.
- Authentication: Auth.js (NextAuth v5) with email/password and Google sign-in, JWT sessions, and server-side session checks on every action. (The original hackathon build used Firebase Auth.)
- AI & LLMs: Qwen API for generating personalized, context-aware skincare advice and routines based on the metrics.
🌟 YouCam API Integration (The Core Engine)
The YouCam AI Skin Analysis API is the foundational engine of TintKin. We integrated it deeply into our capture and simulation workflows to provide skin measurements for a consumer wellness experience.
- The measuring instrument for the coach: Baseline, scheduled check-in and earned scans all come from YouCam Skin Analysis. The coach decides when measuring is worth it, which keeps both cost and noise down. Each scan runs under a fixed time budget and backs off on
429 responses, so a busy moment queues briefly instead of failing.
- Precision Scanning: When a user uploads an optional baseline or progress selfie, the image is securely passed to the YouCam API. We extract the granular data (Wrinkles, Firmness, Age Spots, Radiance) and the overall Skin Age to populate our MongoDB models and update the user's historical charts.
- "What-If" Visualizations: We leverage the YouCam Simulation API to power our standout feature. By calculating the difference between a user's current routine and a proposed "What-If" intervention (like adding SPF daily), we map those deltas to YouCam's simulation intensities. The API returns a highly realistic, visually altered image illustrating a possible outcome, not predicting or guaranteeing how their skin will look.
These screenshots show the current demo account and interface. A simulation is illustrative, and its screen should not be read as a guaranteed result.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
