Curl Code

Inspiration

Have you ever wandered down the shampoo aisle hopelessly lost as the hauntings of internet forums inform you more and more each minute that curly hair should never treated with the same products as straight hair? Well if not, this app might not be for you. But, for those of us it was built for, this app will save us countless confused trips to the hair aisle.

Textured hair is misunderstood. "Why don't you just brush your hair," said every well-meaning straight haired person after hearing about a curly haired person's struggles with hair management. Wearing your hairs curly is difficult as unruly hair is often seen as unprofessional in the workplace and curly hair is nothing if not independent minded.

What it does

Our app seeks to assist those who wish to utilize the Curly Girl Method for styling curly hair. The general gist is to avoid harsh shampoos which strip curly hair of much needed moisture. As a trade-off, other ingredients must be eliminated as they are not water-soluble and require harsh shampoos to wash out. Our app helps scan hair products for these ingredients and makes it easy to know if a hair product is CG approved!

Currently our demo supports barcode scanning to check for curly girl compliance with products that are in our database and has an experimental Google Vision API demo to extract the ingredient list from a picture of the label.

How we built it

Being that three of our four team members are completely new to programming, we decided to go with React Native managed with Expo to build our mobile app as the only experienced developer is a web developer (insert Javascript joke here). Additionally, we needed cross platform support as the only experienced developer is also not a fan of not being able to micromanage her phone (she has an Android).

We also used Firebase Firestore as our database, Firebase Storage as our storage, and Google's Vision API to cut loose with some AI fun.

Challenges we ran into

Lack of sleep. Wanting to do too many things. According to my teammates, "being new to this whole thing."

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are gonna DEMO!!!!!!!! We have a working prototype, we had fun, and we learned lots.

What we learned

Lots. Too much, some might say for being in intro to programming courses. The highlights are: understanding how applications are made, what are some of the current offerings to make application development easier, React and the power of composition and copy-paste.

What's next for Curl Code

Check out our Trello down below!

We'd like to write a python web scraper to auto populate our database with hair products the world over. We'd also like to implement customizable filtering rules as someone spent a long time designing them to be that way. The underlying structure of this project is very extensible with the possibility of becoming a generic cosmetic ingredient helper, similar to MyFitnessPal except for cosmetics.

Built With

• expo.io
• firebase
• firestore
• gcp
• react
• react-native
• vision-api