Far too cheap.

Beauty products retailer and digital trailblazer Sephora says that per-capita, its Pinterest followers spend more money than its Facebook followers, and not just a little bit more. In fact, Pinterest users spend 15 times more on Sephora products than Facebook followers, Sephora’s head of digital Julie Bornstein told me this morning.

“The reality is that when you’re in the Pinterest mindset, you’re actually interested in acquiring items, which is not what people go to Facebook for,” Bornstein said. “Facebook continues to be just a great customer interaction tool that gives us the real-time ability to dialog with our customer; it’s a big customer-service venue for us.”

Ouch.

If you’re Facebook, that’s gotta hurt. You’ve just been downgraded from the bright and shining future of social shopping to the back office hell of customer support.

Sephora jumped on Pinterest hard, mostly because its largely-female marketing team were enthusiastic early adopters. When the company re-launched its website in April last year, it was one of the first retailers to integrate the ‘Pin It’ button sitewide. Individual users share their lists of what Sephora products they love and why — rather than just a putting together a list of fashion products, they can use Pinterest to tell a visual story about why a certain eyeshadow is so great and seek to inspire others. And a dedicated resource on the Sephora digital team helps Sephora staff craft Pinterest strategies.

All of which has made an impact.

Sephora’s following on Facebook is still huge and significant, at 4.7 million fans. And it’s a critical early-warning system for the company. “We hear instantly” about what people love and don’t love, Bornstein says, and Sephora clients connect with each other on the platform, giving each other fashion and beauty tips and advice.

But in terms of immediately measurable commercial impact? Pinterest is currently unmatched.

“E-commerce really is still in the first innings of really leveraging the power of social,” Bornstein says. “But we’ve experimented a lot with social shopping, and this is the first one that has really gotten to scale.”

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc, swanky via photopin cc

Cue big data.

Source: Sephora

ColorIQ from Sephora

Sephora has teamed up with color experts at Pantone to help women (and, hey, maybe some adventurous guys) find the right shade of makeup for just their skin, on the first try.

It’s called ColorIQ, and it uses digital imagining technology to record 27 separate color-corrected images in less than two seconds while using eight different visible light settings and one ultraviolet light setting.

In other words, it’s geek enough for any dude.

According to Sephora, your skin tone is a unique combination of ethnicity, hemoglobin, sun exposure, freckles, skin conditions, and melanin levels.

“Our partner Pantone has spent decades working on the science of color,” Sephora senior vice president Julie Bornstein told me today. ”We’ve mapped 110 shades of skin tone in the U.S.”

Once the ColorIQ device has measured your specific skin tone signature, big data comes into play. Taking the digital images from your face and breaking them down into 100-pixel blocks, Sephora creates a color composite for your skin, and your Pantone SkinTone number.

Then, all the data from women that Sephora has tested worldwide helps determine what foundation will work for you from over 1,000 different combinations, Bornstein says. A representative will simply enter the SkinTone number into Sephora’s iPad app for personalized suggestions.

As Bornstein told VentureBeat: ”This gives us the ability to truly recommend a product based on a woman’s skin for the first time.”

Source: Sephora

The new me, thanks to Sephora. Or not.

Women in one of Sephora’s New York or San Francisco stores will be able to come in and get their skin scanned in the next few weeks. Roll-out to the full 300+ stores in the U.S. will happen at some later time.

“The concept of virtual try-it-on in both the clothing and makeup industries is growing,” Bornstein says. “But this is the first thing that I’ve seen that has a purity to it that’s going to make it very effective.”

Customized fashion using technology and big data to help individual women find the best beauty solutions? Very cool.

But I think I’ll have to pass, personally.

Image credit: Subbotina Anna/ShutterStock