iOS Fashion and Beauty Apps for the Woman Who Has (and knows) Everything
September 7, 2013 5:40 AM Subscribe
(Alternative Title: You're Beautiful When You're Angry)
I'm in a mean mood and I'm looking for fashion and beauty apps on my iPad to cheer myself up.
I was impatient with iPad fashion and beauty apps before, and I'm even more short-tempered about it now. What iOS fashion and beauty apps do you recommend that will impress and delight even me?
Because right now, I'm all like: another magazine app? I have all the magazines already, and these apps cost money to be any use at all and besides they SUCK. Another wardrobe management app? They mostly SUCK and the only ones that maybe theoretically don't SUCK, at least to the undiscerning user, require hours of fiddly editing to get the background out of a photo and it's just not worth it. Another shopping app? That's original and anyway I don't buy new things. A virtual nail art app? Duh, I HAVE nails, why wouldn't I just use those?!? Socially network and show your outfits to all your imaginary friends on Instagram? Explain a) why I would want to do that and b) why I would use your sucky app to do it.
Seriously, the fashion/beauty section is so full of dross, I don't know why anybody bothers.
What I'm looking for, what would please me, is more apps in the vein of the ones I already actually like. These are: New York
Times The Collection, Style.com, Pulse News, Style Me Girl, and Fashion Fix. I also like OnMyFace and MakeupAlley. I confess a sneaking enjoyment of AllWomenStalk. I used to like Blind Lemon, but it lapsed.
Everything else though? GRAR.
There's got to be some more stuff out there that will please even me. Surely.
I was impatient with iPad fashion and beauty apps before, and I'm even more short-tempered about it now. What iOS fashion and beauty apps do you recommend that will impress and delight even me?
Because right now, I'm all like: another magazine app? I have all the magazines already, and these apps cost money to be any use at all and besides they SUCK. Another wardrobe management app? They mostly SUCK and the only ones that maybe theoretically don't SUCK, at least to the undiscerning user, require hours of fiddly editing to get the background out of a photo and it's just not worth it. Another shopping app? That's original and anyway I don't buy new things. A virtual nail art app? Duh, I HAVE nails, why wouldn't I just use those?!? Socially network and show your outfits to all your imaginary friends on Instagram? Explain a) why I would want to do that and b) why I would use your sucky app to do it.
Seriously, the fashion/beauty section is so full of dross, I don't know why anybody bothers.
What I'm looking for, what would please me, is more apps in the vein of the ones I already actually like. These are: New York
Times The Collection, Style.com, Pulse News, Style Me Girl, and Fashion Fix. I also like OnMyFace and MakeupAlley. I confess a sneaking enjoyment of AllWomenStalk. I used to like Blind Lemon, but it lapsed.
Everything else though? GRAR.
There's got to be some more stuff out there that will please even me. Surely.
It's hard to suggest things when you seem so put out by apps that are out there without really saying why. Maybe say why you think apps SUCK instead of just saying that they do? Your comment about FashionFix, for example, was helpful. Also some of the apps you mention aren't actually fashion related at all (Pulse), so you're casting a kind of broad net.
posted by donnagirl at 10:49 AM on September 7, 2013
posted by donnagirl at 10:49 AM on September 7, 2013
Response by poster: Well for example, the "virtual makeup" "virtual nail art" apps are not interesting to me because if they're fine-grained enough to be any good, then they're going to be so fiddly that I might as well paint stuff directly onto my own real face or nails, because it will take less time to get more realistic results. If I were thinking of getting a tattoo, I could see the good sense of an app, but I'm holding off on the tats this year till I can pay for my new bifocals.
Similarly, the wardrobe management apps are usually photo-based and in order to use them' which I tried to do several times, I have to find an old sheet, spread it out on the floor, spread a dress out on it, and then try to auto-edit the background away from the dress. This doesn't work, so I then have to get the ironing board out, iron the sheet, spread it out again, spread out the dress again, and then all over again fail at auto-editing and then manually editing the image so I can actually see the thing. The results are never worth the hours I spend, and it most certainly would not be worth repeating the process hundreds of times even after I got better at it, because the data models for these things are never very well designed anyway in my opinion.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking MeFi to second-guess what I might like, I'm asking if there are any apps that MeFites particularly like to use. If you guess wrong, I'm not going to yell YOUR TASTE IN APPS IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD BECAUSE U SUCK!!!1!!! I just think if everyone else likes an app, I either won't have heard of it or maybe I misjudged it.
posted by tel3path at 11:54 AM on September 7, 2013
Similarly, the wardrobe management apps are usually photo-based and in order to use them' which I tried to do several times, I have to find an old sheet, spread it out on the floor, spread a dress out on it, and then try to auto-edit the background away from the dress. This doesn't work, so I then have to get the ironing board out, iron the sheet, spread it out again, spread out the dress again, and then all over again fail at auto-editing and then manually editing the image so I can actually see the thing. The results are never worth the hours I spend, and it most certainly would not be worth repeating the process hundreds of times even after I got better at it, because the data models for these things are never very well designed anyway in my opinion.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking MeFi to second-guess what I might like, I'm asking if there are any apps that MeFites particularly like to use. If you guess wrong, I'm not going to yell YOUR TASTE IN APPS IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD BECAUSE U SUCK!!!1!!! I just think if everyone else likes an app, I either won't have heard of it or maybe I misjudged it.
posted by tel3path at 11:54 AM on September 7, 2013
Response by poster: Well, the lack of answers suggest that either I've scared everyone off, or the state of the art in fashion/beauty apps really does suck as bad as I feared.
Guess I'll have to code it myself, whatever it is.
posted by tel3path at 12:09 AM on September 9, 2013
Guess I'll have to code it myself, whatever it is.
posted by tel3path at 12:09 AM on September 9, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
Let's see... I like FashionFix a bit, because it's a dressup game that doesn't require me to pretend to be building a career or something. I spend all day pretending to build my real career, I don't need to replicate this in the form of a game. Also, as daft as StyleMeGirl might be, it's kind of fun to dress imaginary other people instead of myself.
The other apps are basically mobile versions of blogs or other online media, but they're so well designed that having them in app form is worthwhile. And, I like the way Pulse lets me set up feeds for certain blogs, it's just more usable than other news aggregators I've found.
But I'm also asking so that I won't keep going towards what I know. It's possible that I'm just too stubborn and need to have my mind opened.
posted by tel3path at 10:12 AM on September 7, 2013