I Tried an Artificial Intelligence Skin Age Predictor — Here's How It Changed My Routine

It all starts with a selfie, but maybe not exactly the kind you would put on your Instagram. The Olay Skin Advisor needs to see your skin in a well-lit environment, without any makeup on, with your hair pulled back, and no smile on your face. Sadly, it hasn't been trained for facial hair yet, so it won't give you an accurate reading if you're a guy.

Here I am, makeup free, though admittedly a day after a facial. Right now, my skin is pretty smooth with the exception of a few dark spots around my mouth from Winter eczema breakouts.

As a former beauty editor, I've been caring for my skin painstakingly for years. I wear sunscreen every day and have been doing so for 10 years. I never go to bed with makeup on. I exfoliate and use antiaging serums and lotions. I know what sensitivities my skin has (fragrance, anything with retinol) and avoid them.

Though the skin analysis comes purely from your selfie, Olay asks a few questions so the tool can give you the best product recommendations for your area of improvement. I shared my biggest complexion concerns (uneven skin tone being at the top of my list), skin type, number of skin care products I use in the morning (three, including daily SPF) and at night, and even my preference on scented vs. unscented.

Olay Skin Advisor uses artificial intelligence (a deep learning algorithm, just like Facebook and Instagram do) to predict your skin age, comparing your selfie to thousands of other photos. Some were submitted on the site by people just like you, but there are more that were fed to the system by the team at Olay for training purposes.

"At the heart of Olay Skin Advisor is the brand's deep learning model, called VizID Technology, which has been modeled on how the human brain sees and perceives women's skin age. We didn't tell it what to look for — it has come to learn what drives women's skin appearance from the hundreds of thousands of selfies in its database," says Dr. Frauke Neuser, Olay Principal Scientist. "It works like our brain. Our brain has been trained over the years to recognize and understand what we see."

Using all that information, the Skin Advisor "analyzes five key aging zones to determine what's driving your skin age and holding it back from looking 10 years younger, for example. These five key aging zones, identified through research by Olay, are the forehead, cheek, mouth, crow's feet, and under eye," says Neuser.

The algorithm tells me my skin age is 31. That's one year older than I am in reality. Though this might seem like a pretty great result, I'm not used to anyone even coming close to guessing my age, so I'm immediately shocked.

The Skin Advisor says my best area is my forehead, which makes sense considering I care for it the most, applying anti-aging serum there before any other part of my face. But it's my worst area that makes me think twice: my under eyes! Though I apply my anti-aging lotions around my eyes, I don't use eye cream. I've tried, but I honestly forget every time.

You know how no one wants to tell you you look tired when you look tired? Well, an algorithm told me. I'll be paying more attention to my undereye circles and puffiness from now on. I already got myself an eye cream with brightening vitamin C and I'm being more careful about tugging at my under eyes when removing my makeup to avoid causing inflammation.

On the other hand, it's pretty nice to know that years of slathering lotion on my face and wearing sunscreen have made a difference. I'm staying committed to my routine!

You can find out your own skin age at Olay's Skin Advisor's website.

Olay took editors on a press trip to Barcelona, Spain that included hotel accommodations.