GlowCast
What it does
GlowCast prepares you for a specific event, end to end, from a single selfie.
Describe your event in your own words. No forms, no quizzes. An AI agent reads the dress code and mood from your sentence. The date sets your preparation window. The city pulls the real weather forecast for the day using Open-Meteo's 16-day forecast.
One guided selfie. Auto-cropped around your face, analyzed in session, never stored.
Skin diagnosis. YouCam Skin Analysis scores eight concerns: hydration, radiance, texture, redness, clarity, oil balance, pores, and dark circles. Plus an overall score. Tap any gauge to see the detected areas overlaid on your own photo with a one-line tip grounded in published dermatology guidance, including ingredient and concentration like "niacinamide 5%."
Your personal color palette. YouCam Facial Color Tones extracts your exact skin, eye, lip, brow, and hair colors. The agent derives your color season and gives you eight flattering shades, plus three to avoid.
Your skin's potential. A generative before and after of your own face targeting your three weakest scores, with a draggable comparison line. Honest wording: a direction, not a promise.
Four looks, on you. The AI stylist reads your event, your palette, and the weather. It shops a catalog of 250 outfits, and YouCam Clothes Virtual Try-On renders four directions on your own body in parallel: a classic, a statement, a relaxed take, and a wildcard. One tap regenerates four new directions for more formal looks or softer colors.
One plan to leave with. A summary page and a downloadable PDF. Your four looks, your palette with hex codes to show in store, and a day-by-day skincare timeline that respects dermatologist pre-event rules, like no new actives near the event and a soothing mask the night before.
How we built it
Frontend. Next.js 16 with App Router, Tailwind CSS 4, and Framer Motion. Deployed on Vercel. A six-step guided flow with a single design system: soft pink and lavender, Liquid Glass surfaces, Playfair Display and Inter fonts.
YouCam APIs. We integrated four YouCam APIs: AI Skin Analysis for eight concerns plus mask overlays, AI Facial Color Tones, AI Clothes Virtual Try-On for four parallel renders per request, and AI Image Generator for image-to-image skin projection. All calls run server-side through Next.js route handlers with upload, task, and continuous polling, exactly as the server-to-server API requires.
AI orchestration. A DeepSeek LLM agent glues the pipeline together. It parses the free-text event, derives the color season from extracted facial colors, designs the four outfit directions, and writes the skincare timeline. Every output is constrained to strict JSON, validated server-side with length caps, banned-claims filters, and hex validation. All advice is grounded in a curated dermatology knowledge base including AAD daily-care guidance, pre-event timelines, and evidence-backed ingredient concentrations.
State management. In-memory first, mirrored to IndexedDB. No storage quotas. Survives reloads. Every redone step invalidates everything downstream so no stale result can ever appear.
Weather integration. Open-Meteo geocoding with validated city autocomplete plus daily forecast, fed to the stylist so the outfit works on the day.
Challenges we ran into
The Skin Simulation endpoint never completed in our tests. Tasks stayed running for over 15 minutes. We pivoted: the skin projection is now built with the AI Image Generator in image-to-image mode, prompted from the user's three weakest scores. Cheaper, faster, and it preserves identity.
Framing constraints pull in opposite directions. Skin Analysis wants a large frontal face while Clothes VTO wants the upper body. We solved it with client-side smart face auto-crop for the analysis selfie and a dedicated guided "fitting photo" step for the try-on.
Signed result URLs expire in about two hours, and file IDs are single-use per feature. We re-encode every result server-side and re-upload per task.
Payload limits caused issues. Re-encoded mask overlays blew past the serverless request limit when sent back with scores. We now send numeric scores only and parse every response defensively.
Keeping the LLM honest was a challenge. Free-text advice can drift. We locked outputs to typed JSON, filtered medical and branded claims, and grounded the coach in a dermatology reference. The worst case is a bland sentence, never a weird one.
Accomplishments we're proud of
A complete, polished product, not a wrapper. Four YouCam APIs chained so each feeds the next. Facial colors feed the palette. The palette feeds outfit choice. Outfit choice feeds the try-on. Skin scores feed the projection prompt. Projection feeds the skincare plan.
Four photorealistic try-ons of the user rendered in parallel in about a minute.
Advice that names ingredients and concentrations, backed by published guidance, with hard safety rules.
A journey a first-time user understands with zero instructions.
What we learned
Real API integration is a product discipline. Rate limits, single-use file IDs, expiring URLs, framing rules, and endpoint quirks shaped the UX as much as design did.
Grounding an LLM beats prompting it politely. A curated knowledge base plus output validation transformed advice quality overnight.
The event context is magic. The same skin scores and colors become ten times more actionable when tied to a date, a place, and a forecast.
What's next for GlowCast
Shop mode. Try on any real product photo. Ref-based VTO is already validated. This is the bridge to retailer catalogs, where try-on is proven to lift conversion 20 to 40 percent and cut returns up to 40 percent, according to Zalando.
Hair color and style suggestions matched to the palette. Endpoints are already tested.
Post-event follow-through. Track skin scores over time against the plan.
B2B widget. GlowCast as an embeddable "event concierge" for beauty and fashion e-commerce.
Built With
- deepseek-llm
- framer-motion
- next.js-16
- open-meteo-api
- tailwind-css-4
- vercel
- youcam-ai-image-generator-api
- youcam-clothes-virtual-try-on-api
- youcam-facial-color-tones-api
- youcam-skin-analysis-api
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