Beauty is for
everyBODY.
Your AI-powered digital drag mom, designed with — not for — transfemme people. Live mirror guidance. Affirming language. Curated, allergen-aware products. A drag mom in your ear when you need her.
Beauty wasn’t built for us.
So most of us learned alone.
Trans femme people learning makeup face a stack of frictions no other beauty consumer does:
An app that helps you create the face you see inside.
TruBeauté is the first AR mirror + drag-mom voice + product engine built end-to-end for transfemme makeup learning. Always: enhance, soften, balance, lift, warm. Never: fix, flaw, hide.
Real-time face-shape guidance
MediaPipe Face Landmarker classifies your shape on-device, renders glowing zones + directional sweep arrows + STOP markers. Privacy-first: nothing leaves your phone.
Your personal drag mom
Hands-free voice commands ("Hey Trouvé, next step"). OpenAI TTS narrates every step warm, patient, and ready to guide you. Because doing makeup with your hands full is the whole point.
58 trans-friendly products
Allergen-aware (10-allergen taxonomy), shade-matched (120 curated shades), beard-shadow-aware (peach vs orange corrector logic). 100% Amazon Associates monetized — zero inventory.
The conversation you never got to have with your drag mom — at 3 a.m., every day.
Voice + vision + multi-turn chat persona inside the app — not a generic AI assistant retrofitted to beauty. Powered by GPT-5.2, narrated by OpenAI's Nova voice today (the founder's actual voice is in studio recording now). Recommendations come from a 3,158-product catalog ingested at $0 marginal cost.
A working app, not a deck.
Visit trubeaute.com and use it now. iOS / Android apps are wrapped via Capacitor and ready to submit.
Tech stack
Already integrated
Lived experience
is the unfair advantage.
Built by a transfemme drag artist who learned makeup the hard way — every line of language, every CV signal, every product cut comes from the user the app exists for. You can copy a feature. You can’t copy a founder.
Forbidden-word checks (flaw / hide / fix / passing / real / masculine / feminine) are enforced in pytest — no recommendation, prompt, or copy can ship without passing. Cis-built competitors can’t bolt this on later without a rewrite.
Curated INCI ingredient data + 120 shade swatches + face-shape contour maps + beard-shadow corrector logic. Hand-built against the actual transfemme purchase journey. Six months of research already shipped.
“TruBeauté is not about transformation for perfection — it helps users create the face they see inside. Always enhance, soften, balance, lift, warm. Never fix, flaw, problem, hide.”
— TruBeauté product principle, codified in the engineering test suite
Three timelines just collided.
AI vision finally works on faces
GPT-4o Vision (May 2024) is the first model with the chromatic + structural reasoning to extract undertone, MST bucket, and beard shadow from a selfie reliably. MediaPipe Face Landmarker hit production-grade accuracy in 2023. Two years ago this product literally couldn’t exist.
Trans visibility hit cultural escape velocity
+340% growth in "trans makeup" search interest since 2020. Drag Race global syndication. Trans creators leading TikTok beauty discovery. Audience and demand are both at all-time highs — and so are the political headwinds creating mass migration to private, affirming digital spaces.
Beauty incumbents are still optimizing for the wrong user
Sephora’s Virtual Artist, YouCam, ModiFace — all optimize for cis-femme face geometry and use evaluative ("flaw / fix") language. No major beauty-tech app has shipped a transfemme-first experience. The gap is wide and unclaimed.
A wedge into a $580B category.
Beauty-tech alone is forecast to reach $165B by 2030 (Allied Market Research) on the back of AR try-on + AI-powered product matching — exactly TruBeauté’s lane.
LGBTQ+ buyers spend ~7% above index on personal care + grooming (Nielsen Diversity Insights). Trans / NB consumers index even higher on "willing to pay for affirming brands."
At 5% paid conversion of US trans/NB adults alone — before adding cis-femme allies, drag, theatre/film MUA, and the global TAM. Realistic 36-month target: ~80K paying users.
SOM derivation: 1.6M US trans/NB adults (Williams) × 5% (Pro) × $71.88/yr + affiliate revenue per active = ~$84M/yr at saturation. Beachhead model only — does not include adjacent demand.
Two revenue lines.
Both already wired live.
Pro tier — $5.99/mo or $49/yr
Industry-standard freemium-to-paid conversion in beauty-tech runs 4–7%. We model conservatively at 5%.
~6–10% of every product click
ascsubtag — full reporting back to specific shade + stepBeauty industry affiliate AOV ~$42; Amazon Beauty commission 4–10% by category. Free-tier users monetize too — affiliate revenue compounds even before Pro conversion.
What's shipped, what's paid,
what's growing.
Production-live since April 2026. Stripe MRR live since the same week. All numbers below are direct from our DB as of June 2026 — not projections.
93% of users who tried the product used Stealth Mode exclusively. By design, Stealth Mode leaves zero DB trail — users we can't even identify trusted us enough to keep coming back. Validates the "closeted user" TAM directly from production data.
"I don't have patience for YouTube tutorials. I'm so glad I found this."
— Unprompted · week one
The trans-femme wedge is the entry point — not the ceiling.
Same engine, same catalog, same monthly economics. Different audience, different LTV. The path from great affirming beauty app to operating system for trans-affirming consumer discovery.
25–60k Pro · iOS + Android · App-Store Pride 2027
YouCam A: $25M @ $200M · Hers A: $35M @ $200M
Adjacent launches · 20–40 B2B partner drops · BR/ES/DE/QC · Trouvé voice marketplace
FaceApp B: $50M @ $400M
1M+ paying subs · Private-label SKUs with drag partners (40–60% margin)
$1B+ acquisition/IPO. Bumble IPO $13B w/ smaller TAM.
17 named acquirers.
Every category has a recent comp.
None of this is hypothetical. Each of the four categories below has a documented public-market comparable in the past five years.
Even the failure case returns close to capital. Every other path has a documented public-market comparable in the past 5 years.
Most pre-seeds pitch a slide deck.
We pitch a working app.
Already shipped
12-month roadmap
No one else starts here.
| Feature | TruBeauté | Sephora Virtual Artist | YouCam Makeup | ModiFace / L’Oréal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Designed by + for trans femme users | ✓ Founder-led | — | — | — |
| Beard-shadow color-corrector logic | ✓ MST-bucketed | — | — | — |
| Affirming-language enforcement | ✓ Codified in tests | Evaluative copy | "Beautify" framing | Clinical framing |
| Hands-free drag-mom voice | ✓ Trouvé · Web Speech API | — | — | — |
| Allergen-aware filtering (10-allergen INCI graph) | ✓ Hard-drop pre-rec | — | — | — |
| Face-shape adaptive contour (6 shapes + override) | ✓ Live AR + calibrator | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| Inventory-free monetization | ✓ Sub + affiliate | Owned retail | Affiliate only | Brand-owned |
Incumbents won’t pivot — their entire content + product graph is cis-femme-default. The only way to ship our product is to start over.
Built by the user it serves.
Iyal Basen
Founder & CEO · Mother of the Haus of TruBeauté
Singer-songwriter. Drag queen. Trust & Safety + ML safety analyst. Iyal lives in the intersection of every discipline TruBeauté requires — performing artist who has spent years applying makeup for stage, T&S engineer who knows what it takes to ship affirming AI in production, and transfemme person who knows exactly which products work, which don’t, and which ones still need to exist.
Hiring with this round: mobile/AR engineer · creator partnerships lead · part-time community manager. Roles scoped to land before App Store launch.
Raising $100K – $250K pre-seed.
Friends-and-family / pre-seed round to take a fully-shipped product from private beta to App-Store launch and validated growth. 12-month runway · founder-led · capital-efficient by design.
+ AI/AR development
+ paid testing
+ community programs
+ post-launch support
Why this round size makes sense: the technical heavy-lifting is already done. This raise funds distribution, creator network, and 12 months of runway — not core engineering.
What we deliver in 12 months: App Store + Play Store launch, ~10K total users, 500–1K paying Pro subscribers, 10 partnered creators, ~$80–120K ARR — clean metrics to lead a $1.5–2M seed.
Beauty is for
everyBODY.
We’re not building another beauty app. We’re building the one this community should have had ten years ago.
