14 DAY TRIAL // I still haven't met the woman who's completely satisfied with the way she looks. Even the most beautiful ones find many reasons to complain. It's either that their nose is too big, their lips are too thin, their face is too pale or any other reason you can think of. In order to make every woman happy, the programmers at Universal Hedonics have developed The Mirror of Beauty.
Even if it doesn't help you change your physical appearance in real life, it will do wonders on your photos. The Mirror of Beauty lets you change any detail of your face and makes you look like you've just stepped out of the cover of a fashion magazine.
How can it do that? Well, first of all, it provides you with a wide range of makeup options that you can apply and even more, it has a category of PLUS options that unfortunately can't be tested because it is only available in the registered version of the application.
To start working with The Mirror of Beauty, you have to select a picture that displays your entire face or you can test the functionality of the program with one of the provided faces. To make sure that the program has the correct coordinates of your face, you have to select the 'Fine Tune Outline' option that lets you choose the exact position of the face outline, the lips, nose, eyes and eyebrows in your picture. If you don't modify these coordinates, the program will use its default data and it most probably won't find your face elements correctly.
After your face tuning is complete, you can move on to the makeup options available in The Mirror of Beauty. They are provided in the order that you would perform a usual makeup operation. You start with the face foundation and work your way to changing the hairstyle.
The Foundation is available in a wide range of shades and you can choose the amount of foundation to apply. It also indicates the natural color of your face, in order to guide you to choose the appropriate shade. Next is the lipstick that will be applied taking into consideration the thickness that you choose and the gloss level. Here, you can also choose from a variety of colors, from the usual red shades to the modern ones, like blue, green or black.
The Eye Shadow panel allows you to customize the look of the eye shadow in certain limits: you can choose the shadow color, its thickness and the amount of eye shadow applied above the eyes, below them and on the side of your eyes, but you can't select the exact region where to apply the makeup and this may result into some unnatural makeup effects.
You can also give a contour to your eyes by adding some eye liner, which is available in over 50 colors and with customizable pencil size and thickness. Having finished with the eye region, all you have to do now is add some eyebrow mascara and a little blush and you're done.
The final step for a complete makeover is choosing the perfect hairdo. The Mirror of Beauty lets you choose between four categories of hair styles: long, medium, short and unusual. I can honestly say that this is the part where I had the most fun. It's unbelievable how a different hairdo and hair color changes your entire appearance. The hair color varies with the hairdo you choose, but you can modify it from the color panel and although the hair colors don't look very natural, you will still have fun trying different styles.
At last, a feature that I really liked in The Mirror of Beauty is the Auto-makeover. It provides you with eight different makeover presets: natural, day, evening, sultry, beach girl, goth, future and wild card that will apply random makeup effects to your face. You can also view another 8 makeovers with added hairdo and apply them to your picture.
The other category of options that I already mentioned is the 'PLUS Options' menu that includes features like: Bee-stung lips, De-age, Warp to model, Feminize, Make painting, Botox, Nose job, Blend faces and Glitter.
The Good
The Mirror of Beauty creates a real makeover of your face and also gives you a clue about the look that would suite you best. You can use it as a hairdo tester, to easily decide if you should take that haircut you've always wanted or as a makeup advisor, showing you which colors to use in your makeup.
The Bad
Every time you choose to modify something in the auto-makeover preview, like the position of the hairdo over your face, the application will freeze and reload the thumbnails of the provided makeovers.
The Demo version of The Mirror of Beauty is pretty limited, especially by the fact that it doesn't allow you to save your modified picture and it adds a watermark with the text 'The MIRROR' over the preview of your new look. Also, you cannot test any of the PLUS options, which seem very interesting, but are disabled in the demo version.
The main window of The Mirror of Beauty is made up of three different panels: the original face of your model and the main menu, the current makeover preview and the Makeup or Plus options menu. The space that remains between these panels seems to be transparent, but it shows pieces of the windows opened before, the wallpaper or a combination of them, making the application's interface look unprofessional.
The Truth
Given the limited demo, to fully enjoy the functionality of The Mirror of Beauty, you have to register. Although it's not very expensive at $19.95, the application can be used just for fun, because the modifications are quite visible in the output image. In the end, it's up to you to decide if it's worth the money.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
