Using AI As a Future Beauty Professional
Stephanie Carter
Co-Founder, Beauty as a Business
Using AI As a Future Beauty Professional
Super excited to be here. Thank you, everyone, for spending time with BaaB today at the third annual Beauty Summit. I apologize, I’ve lost my voice this week, so I sound a little hoarse, but I’m really excited about the stuff that we’re going over. As you guys may have heard Chris mention, I’ve been working with schools for a long time. I see a lot of my school pals in the chat. Shout out to Julie, Jennifer Moore. Hey guys, great to see you here today.
You guys have heard about it all day, I know it’s come up in other presentations, but AI is the big buzz this year, and so we are going to keep talking about it because it’s important and there’s some other great stuff for you to know. So again, just a quick summary for those of you who are just joining us who didn’t see some of the previous presentations. What is AI?
What is AI?
It’s a broad term. Honestly, it’s in a lot of the things that you’re already using and interacting with every day from credit card companies to Google. It really is kind of everywhere. But the big thing for sure lately has been ChatGPT.
So what does a world with ChatGPT look like? It’s the beginning of the end. I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding. No, but really there’s been a lot of anxiety and fear about what the rise of AI means, and I think the biggest thing to note is that it doesn’t cut hair or give facials or do nails. So that’s pretty good. But the thing that it can do is save a lot of time, especially using it for what a lot of beauty professionals struggle to do. They know it’s important, but it can feel like heavy lifting, and that’s social media. Think about all the stuff that goes into social media and showing up consistently on social media. You’ve got content creation, writing captions, editing videos, optimizing your posts, the list goes on and on and on. And yet we know that if it’s done right, it can have a huge impact on how much money a beauty professional makes, and that’s what all of your students are aiming to do. Right? They want to be successful in the beauty industry.
Other Places AI Can Help
And more than just social media, I do think that we’re going to hear a lot about AI coming up in other areas of the industry and other ways that beauty professionals can utilize it. It’s moving so fast and so many things are changing that hopefully by Beauty Summit number four, this list is even longer, but I think there’s going to be a lot of good reasons to embrace AI as a beauty professional.
What Would You Outsource to AI?
So I want to take a minute, I want to ask the audience for social media. Think about, again, all the stuff you have to do. What would you outsource to AI, if you could, regarding social media? Go ahead and throw that in the chat. Is it writing captions? Is it the social media strategy and optimization? Is it design and image editing? Would it be the posting? Oh yeah, I’m seeing a ton of writing captions, for sure. Captions take so much mental energy, right? Well, the great news is that AI can actually help with all of these things. These are all parts of social media the AI can jump in and lighten that load for.
Yes, that’s right, John, E, all of the above. It was kind of a trick question. But no, really, I mean I do think there are some people I’ve heard who love doing photo editing. I’ve actually heard, for some people, it’s kind of a therapeutic, they like going in, they like looking at the photos, they like thinking about things. I really haven’t heard a ton of people say they love caption writing, but I do think there are parts of social media that can feel harder than others. So it’s great to know that right now we’re seeing that AI can really help with a lot of this stuff. So I’m going to jump in and I’m going to talk about how AI can help with these things. Give me just a second. I clicked over to the chat. There we go.
Free VS Paid Tools
So I’m going to go over some free tools and paid tools, but I will say this: Obviously, people want to make money off of AI, so a lot of tools are doing this thing where they offer a free trial or a free version, but the free version doesn’t give you access to either, like all the AI tools or the best AI that’s in the tool. So I do think that students can use free tools that are out there, and I do think it will still be helpful and it will still maybe help them show up more frequently and consistently on social media. But any good business person knows that you should invest in your sales and marketing. So it might be worth it to get the paid version of some of these tools. And I’m going to make a recommendation a little bit later in the presentation.
AI Ideas & Strategy
Okay. In any social media journey, we need to start with some planning. We need to get ideas, we need to think about our strategy. And what I have on this slide here is, I pretended to be a student. I said, “Okay, I’m in school. Here’s where I’m going to school, here’s what I’m studying. I really want to get some more clients. Can you help me think of ideas of what I should do on social media?” And here are the responses. And then I really just kind of kept chatting with ChatGPT. I said, “What about this? Should I do that?” And I talked to ChatGPT like it was a coach or it was a consultant, just talking one-on-one with it. And honestly, I don’t think these answers are bad. It actually came up with nine separate answers on the list for me. The ones that you don’t see on here were about running contests and giveaways, making my schedule very clear so that people knew when to book with me, and also using holidays and special occasions to promote specials.
So when I think about when Beauty as a Business goes in and talks with students about social media strategy, a lot of the stuff that’s on this list is what we would say. In fact, I went and I talked to a bunch of my friends out in the marketing world and I said, “Tell me what ideas you would suggest to a student.” And honestly, this stuff that’s on this list that ChatGPT came up with showed up on a lot of the other lists of these other marketers. So I think that one of the awesome things that students can do is, basically act like ChatGPT is a free coach or consultant that they can go in and just start talking and chatting about their social media with.
This is the free version, this isn’t four that requires payment. So this is one that they could go in and make an account for free. But now that ChatGPT has given us some direction, we can start creating the content and work on the posts using some of these ideas.
AI For Captions
So I’m going to start with something that I always, always hear students complain about, and that is captions. They never know what to write, they don’t feel like they’re writers, and sometimes it takes a lot to remember to post more than just one or two lines with a few sparkle emojis. Social media captions, really, they can be utilized to do a lot more than people think. I mean, honestly, social media captions can become a mini blogging platform. We’ve seen for a while that sometimes the longer captions get more engagement. But again, that can be really overwhelming to someone who doesn’t feel like they’re a writer.
Also, I think about when you’ve spent an entire day working, doing stuff, interacting with your clients, you may have gotten some great pictures of before and afters or just sort of the day in the life of being a beauty professional or a beauty student, but maybe mentally you’re just a little too tapped out to think of a great caption to put on social media. And then what ends up happening is those photos just sit in someone’s phone and they never actually get posted. So here are a couple solutions. We’re going to start with the free one. We’re going to stick with our free version of ChatGPT.
So I again stayed on ChatGPT and I entered this prompt. You can see the prompt at the top there. I talked about the picture that I had. I chose this picture over here on the side. It’s like, okay, this is a real type of student picture that a student could have. In the prompt, I did a little bit of a description, I added in some specific details. I told ChatGPT my goal, which is I want new clients. And down here, one, two, three, four, you can see what it came up with. I don’t think it’s too bad. I don’t love number four, I don’t like the “Trust me, I’m a student.” I don’t know what that’s about. That feels off to me. But three out of four isn’t bad. And honestly, reading through these, I was kind of like, actually what I would probably end up doing is picking and choosing some of my favorite parts from one, two, three, maybe even a little bit of four, and combining it into something that I would actually use.
If you even make sure to request it, if you say something like, “Can you give me some emojis? Can you give me some hashtags?” it’ll come up with those for you as well. Now, on ChatGPT-4, you can upload images so it can react to the visual, but I feel like this free version is doing a pretty dang good job of polishing it up, giving me something to use. Is this going to win a Pulitzer Prize? No, but I do think, again, this alleviates when somebody feels stuck when they’re like, “I just don’t even know where to start. I feel so awkward writing a caption.”
Here’s the other thing that we know is really awkward: People don’t like to sell themselves. Selling can be a very hard trait that our students have to learn, and they don’t know how to promote themselves, they don’t know how to write a marketer. So I just think this is a great solution to, at the very least, get some ideas, kick you in a direction that’s going to work well rather than feeling stuck. I think that the bottom line that we have to keep reminding our students is, the students, the beauty professionals who show up consistently on social media, they’re the ones who win. They’re the ones who grow their books. They’re the ones who get booked out, make the most money, can up their prices and have all that great stuff happening.
So this is a screenshot, I know it’s a little blurry, but there is a tool called Later that Beauty as a Business sometimes recommends to our students. It’s a free app. Well, it has a free version on this app. It’s a posting app for social media. But we’re seeing this a lot more. Basically, every social media scheduler or tool is starting to have a caption generator built in because surprise, beauty professionals are not the only people who feel like writing captions is hard or that they can’t think of good captions.
So I think there’s going to be a lot of options out there depending on what tool you use. And really, I just think being stuck on captions is going to be kind of a thing of the past. With Later, you can only get the caption generator with a paid version. This is one of those situations that I mentioned earlier where you might need to pay for the tool to get full access to all of the AI capabilities. But just for an example, Later, to get access to the full AI suite, I think it will cost a student $17 per month or about $180 annually.
Tips For Using AI For Captions
So just to recap, writing captions using AI, what we’re going to talk about here, this is called prompt engineering. So it’s like, you are going to want to get better and better at the prompts that you write because the better the prompt, the better the output, and the best prompts are going to give as much detail as possible. We’re going to talk about goals, things that we want to have happen. We’re going to put in details like location, time, pricing. Really anything that you can think of, you can feed into this prompt to help the AI come up with something that feels very relevant, very specific to the caption that you’re trying to write. I mean, like I say here, don’t be afraid to generate a couple different options. It’s as simple as clicking a button that says, “Regenerate this answer.” And it’ll come up with a whole other list of captions that you can look through and pick and choose. Put a couple together, find the right one, and then of course get hashtag and emoji suggestions as well.
AI For Images and Design
So next, let’s talk about images and design. Here’s the thing: The best thing for your students to be using for images is still actual photos of themselves and their clients. So even though there are text to image generators like Dolly or Midjourney, I’m actually still going to stand by the very best thing for beauty professionals is that they should gather content from working on their clients. But where I think AI comes in handy, for students especially, would be getting a tool like Canva Pro. So this is $120 per year, and it’s got a full AI suite of features. And I’m going to take you through some of those now.
The first feature that I want to point out is rough. On any platform, this is just not a hundred percent yet. And we’ve tested a few, and I know that you saw some earlier in Parker’s presentation, but it’s very clear that text to image is just, it’s not there yet. So I don’t recommend trying to make a ton of photos with this. You can see the prompts that I put in at the bottom. This is in Canva’s text to image. So I don’t know why the prompt of a woman getting her nails done generates this nightmarish effect of nail hands working on a person’s face. It’s very odd. It can be very disturbing. And this is why your students are still going to have to know how to take good photos and videos. They can’t fake those yet.
And while that feature didn’t work, the good news is the other ones did, and I’m probably most excited by this one. It was so easy to use. It’s exactly what it says here. So I went into Canva, I logged in, and I searched for beauty templates to use in Canva. And at the top it says, “Try Magic Design.So all I did was I grabbed that photo that I showed you guys before, I uploaded it, and let’s see what happened.
It gave me all of these. I did tell it that I wanted some Instagram Story posts. So it just took that photo, put it in a bunch of different templates. I didn’t have to do anything. This was really as simple as just uploading the photo. And then I clicked through, and up at the top here, you can see where it says style. You can drop down. Actually I’m going to go back to this other slide.
Over here where it says fun, colorful, professional, and it’s got all the colors together here, you can select different combinations of those in this Magic Design and it sort of puts them together. And then like I said, it comes out with… Oh, whoops. It comes out with basically a whole bunch of graphics that you can choose from. So I went through and I said, “Oh, I’m going to play around with the colors. This doesn’t really feel like my brand.” So then it came out with this, and I said, “Yeah, this is great.”
This was as easy as just changing the text, downloading it to my phone, and I could post it to Instagram pretty immediately.
I don’t think that every post from your students needs to be designed, but when they are, when they’re trying to promote a special, when they’re trying to talk about a special event or a holiday or even just get the word out that they’re starting to take clients, that look of professional design can be such a bonus. Bad design makes a product, a service, a person feel so cheap, so we want to avoid that. And I think that this is a great solution for students.
As I said, they can play around with different styles. You can add headline texts. I think the other cool thing with Magic Design is it can come up with a lot of different formats, everything from an Instagram post to a YouTube banner. And this generates in less than two minutes with an image. So imagine students being able to set up a consistent brand across all social media platforms and doing it quickly or being able to change it or modify it quickly. It’s just a really cool tool that’s available to people.
The other one that I was excited to try was the Magic Edit. So I knew that the text to image generator was kind of weak, and I thought this might be a little hit or miss. So I was kind of skeptical about this feature.So here is the photo I chose. I’m sorry if it’s a little blurry for you guys. But basically, why I chose this one is, if you look, there’s a person doing hair, but the counter in front is just kind of blank, and then there’s a weird plant that’s half cut off. So I uploaded this into Canva, and over on the left side or maybe the right side to you guys, you can see that there’s this list of tools. There’s somewhere where you can remove the background. There’s the Magic Eraser to remove something from the picture, and then there’s the Magic Edit where you can add things or change things in the photo.
This was the first try, and what it generated, not too bad, but it does still feel a little too fake for me. And I don’t know why the plants are all in weird places, but I thought that I would give it another go.
So I changed the prompts to beauty products and tools, and regenerated, and here was the next set. I thought that this one was the best one, so I selected it, and I don’t think it looks too bad. So what I like for Canva is, I think that their AI tools can quickly get some design or touch-ups done for your students and really help them with photo editing.
In a lot of student photos, I’ve noticed, especially when they’re taken on a busy student clinic floor, there’re often random things in the photo like mannequin heads or maybe someone’s arm or someone in a background mirror that just looks a little weird. So I tried the Magic Eraser with Canva, and as you can see here in the original photo, there was a little bit of the cape there. So I uploaded this. Again, I did the brushing tool, the Magic Eraser tool, and it worked a treat, took out what I needed. So I think that one of the things that can be hard for students is, a lot of times the environments that they’re taking photos in are busy and something like a Magic Eraser can just help touch up those photos a little bit.
I think I might have mentioned this, but Canva does also have a caption generator. They also mentioned like, “Hey, you can write blogs here. You can come up with content ideas here.” So it might be that your students feel like they can kind of use this as a marketing suite and do everything from one place. Canva also has a scheduler. It has lots of video editing tools and a caption generator. Guys, I promise that Canva did not sponsor this session. I was just going through, and out of all the tools I looked at with AI, I just felt strongly that this one might be the most student friendly. So I feel like with something like Canva Pro or Later, those might be the best tools if students are willing to pay for something. But I still think students can create great social media using the free tool like ChatGPT.
BaaB Free AI Webinars
So we want to get all of this great info out to your students because I know none of them are on this call right now, but this is important for you guys to hear as well. So the Beauty as a Business is going to be doing some webinars in May for free. We’re going to have a couple different options. We are going to go over this with your students. We’re going to show them, tell them how they can edit their photos, write captions, some posting stuff. Just basically say, “Hey, if you’re trying to make a consistent on-brand social media presence, if you know how important that is for you as a future beauty professional, come to this webinar. We’re going to go over some basics to get you started.”
The easiest way to get notified is, go to the Beauty as a Business website, sign up for a demo and get on our email list, and we will let you know when these webinars are going to happen. Anyone can come, it’s totally free, open for everyone, but only our BaaB schools will have access to the on-demand recordings to play for other classes or for other students who can’t make it that day.
Bring Baab To Your Beauty Schools. Talk to Stephanie!
I hope this has been valuable information. I hope this has been some cool insight for you guys. So if you’ll permit me, just my quick elevator pitch for Beauty as a Business. Beauty as a Business is a digital social media and digital marketing curriculum for your students. Our courses go over things like TikTok, Google Reviews, and even websites. And all of this is designed to give your students foundational knowledge to work from so that they can start creating their marketing strategies while they’re students, while they’re in school. There are worksheets, there are quizzes, there’s tools.
This is stuff that could take somebody years to figure out or start using, and it’s all bundled up right in one place. Super easy to use. You can get BaaB on LAB, you can get it on CIMA. If you don’t have either of those great platforms, you can get it through our LMS, just ask. But go to the website, beautyasabusiness.com, fill out the form, get a free demo, come to these AI webinars, let your students come and see some of these tools at work. And we’re excited to set the next generation of beauty professionals off on the right foot. And then Chris, I don’t know if this is a spoiler alert or not, but we’re giving away 20 free seats to BaaB.
Chris Linford:
Yes, we are. That’s why I jumped on. We are going to have one lucky winner that we’re going to post in the chat who is going to get up to 20 free seats for their students for Beauty as a Business, the full curriculum. That’s about a thousand dollars value there. But for sure, everybody put in the chat your love for Stephanie. A lot of really good free content, such good content. Share with the students who are trying to build their brand and look professional and be professional on social media. Parker, as he’s getting the winner ready, randomizing that, if you are a BaaB school, put in the chat what do you love about BaaB. What problems does it solve in your school as you try to teach social media?
Stephanie Carter:
I definitely have seen some of our BaaB peeps out there. I love seeing them at the Beauty Summit.
Chris Linford:
And Stephanie, we know that social media changes a lot. Obviously it’s tough for schools to keep up with the changes. Is there a place for Beauty a business where people can get the live updates, where BaaB is always talking about updates, maybe different tools, where should they follow?
Stephanie Carter:
Oh, totally. I think the best place is our Instagram account, @BeautyAsABiz. Maybe Parker can throw that into the chat, our handle into the chat. That is where we are going to tell you about new features. We’re testing out things, like a recent experiment we just ran was, maybe you guys heard recently, you can start paying for the little check mark on Facebook and Instagram. So we did that. We’re seeing what the results are, we’re sharing. Does it really get you more reach? Does it really give you more power as a business? So we love sharing that news. And I would say, definitely our Instagram Stories, our Instagram profile is the place to get all the latest.
Chris Linford:
Awesome. And like you said, any school, if you’re in Pivot Point LAB or Milady CIMA, or if not, they can experience Beauty as a Business in all of those different ways.
Stephanie Carter:
Yep.