Chinese selfie photo app BeautyPlus edits your face: Enlarge eyes, look slimmer

Design a photo app from the ground up to cater to Asian girls, and you’d probably get BeautyPlus. Dressed up in pink motifs, French lacing, and cute icons, the app comes with a whole slew of enhancements to beautify a selfie picture and make it look exactly the way you want.

Unsurprisingly, the app’s userbase is 90 percent female.

Developed by Xiamen, China-based CommSource Technology, BeautyPlus has surpassed one million downloads and 639K monthly actives after going live on the iOS App Store for two months. This despite being priced at USD 1.99.

Interestingly, the founders and investors of the company prefer to keep a low profile, although I did manage to keep in touch with Lisa Lin, a staffer at CommSource.

She tells me that despite being located in China, the company’s app is targeted at users in other countries as the Chinese market is already dominated by companies like Meitu, which launched its own smartphone with dual 8-megapixel cameras for the selfie-obsessed. It has more than five million installs on Android alone.

But international markets are no cakewalk either. While 60 percent of BeautyPlus’ users come from Japan, competition among kawaii photo apps is fierce.

The other countries in Asia-Pacific, while relatively untapped, are quite diverse with different user behaviors and languages. But BeautyPlus is tackling the challenge head on with English, Korean, and Thai language support and the launch of an Android version.

According to Lisa, the efforts are bearing fruit: the app achieved number one in the photo category in the App Store in Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Macau, Cambodia and a few other Asian countries.

Self-photo apps have become a lucrative niche in the photo app industry. Camera360 includes a self-portrait mode, while Perfect365 essentially allows women to apply digital makeup after the photo is taken. Facetune even lets you apply fake hair to your bald patches.

BeautyPlus is not the first selfie app from China to take a stab at the international market: Baidu has Wonder Camera, which has totalled more than one million installs on Android.

Under the hood, these beautification apps have algorithms that recognize faces and features like eyes, noses, and cheeks. The interesting part comes with what they can do with these photos.

We’re not just talking about Instagram filters.