Amanda Gerut here, pinch hitting for Allie. I was born into a family of sparse eyelashes. Some people have thick, natural doe eyes; for others it’s Maybelline; but for me nothing really worked. Mascara makes me look like spiders are climbing out of my eyeballs, but without darkened lashes, I don’t look particularly alive. I discovered lash extensions after I moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and I’ve been paying for them in hours and dollars on a biweekly basis ever since.
Enter the robot, made by a startup called Luum. Before Nathan Harding co-founded Luum, he co-founded Ekso Bionics, which built wearable robots that got stroke and spinal-cord patients rehabbing and relearning how to move after a disability. In that world, the wrong kind of robot can kill someone, said Luum CEO Jo Lawson.
Harding turned a gimlet-eyed focus on lashes after a mentor bought an extension franchise business and described the service to Harding—high-margin, addictive, and applied one hair at a time. Harding watched lash artistry on YouTube, and decided it sat right at the edge of human capability, and concluded it would be a great job for a robot, said Lawson. She joined Luum as president in 2023 after more than 15 years in marketing and product roles at Apple, PayPal, and Movado, and was named CEO in 2024, which allowed Harding to step back into the CTO seat. What sold her on the job, she said, was getting to work on something “magically weird”—a phrase used by Long Journey Ventures, the fund that led Luum’s Series A.
That round closed in 2024 and brought capital raised to $30 million, co-led by Artifact Capital and Boardman Bay Capital Management, with Ulta Beauty among Luum’s earlier backers. A convertible round since has brought the total to $36 million, said Luum CFO Tai Hsia. Gordie Nye—former CEO of the company that developed a fat-freezing procedure known as CoolSculpting—chairs the board.
The exoskeleton background, with a focus on safety, shows up in the way Lawson described the hardware. That’s when I went from curious to very intrigued. The arm is built so it physically can’t touch your closed eyelids, said Lawson, and the wands that tend to your lashes are flexible and featherlight, attached by magnets weak enough that if you flinch or someone bumps the machine, the wands pop off and the lash artist working with the robot can swap in a fresh pair and keep going.
“It feels like somebody is brushing your lashes,” Lawson said.
A full set of lashes in a salon with a human lash artist takes an hour and a half to two hours. Sometimes it’s even longer if you’re going for full-volume glam. Luum’s robot now works on both eyes simultaneously and can wrap it up in about an hour, said Lawson, so about half the time. A lash artist preps you, loads you in, consults you on the look, and does the finishing touches. Luum has about 150 terabytes of session data to train on, with the network getting faster as volume grows. The company continues to train its AI and aims to cut the appointment time to about a half an hour eventually. Luum has studios in Dallas, Newport Beach, and Oakland, and runs machines inside some Nordstrom and Ulta stores. The company employs three or four lash artists per robot, so the machine can run all day. (Lawson and Hsia declined to share revenue and financial figures.)
McKinsey pegs the core global beauty market—skin care, cosmetics, hair care, and fragrance—at $590 billion by 2030, growing 5% annually from $441 billion in 2024. Outside the core four, you’ve got spa services, injectables, men’s shaving, sun care, and supplements that add another $820 billion on top. Lawson says Luum is building a new category she calls “intelligent beauty services,” that ultimately won’t stop at lashes. There’s eyebrow threading and shaping, microneedling, and other services that could help whip your pores into shape, said Lawson.
“Lashes are our beachhead,” said Lawson. “We envision a world where anything that needs to be done in this space can be something that we automate, speed up, simplify and do safer, faster, more effectively, and more consistently.”
I had to consult an expert, my longtime lash artist, Julianna Crisafuli. (Full disclosure, she’s never used the Luum robot, and neither have I.) We discussed the possibilities during my regular appointment. She wondered about hooded eyes, monolids, and almond-shaped eyes that require some design to bring someone’s aesthetic goal to fruition. Crisafuli customizes lash designs as needed so that someone with hooded eyes (me) can still get cat-eye lash extensions without them feeling heavy and droopy.
She mostly worried about how safe it could be and pointed out that the prices online were higher than what she charges. Could she ever see herself investing time or resources in a robot?
“I’d be holding my breath the whole time,” she said, “wondering how it’s going to look, all the mistakes that could possibly be in there, and the lack of personalization to it.”
I’m keeping my standing two-week appointments for now, but I’m really curious about what these robots can do for my pores.
See you next time,
Amanda Gerut
amanda.gerut@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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