Luum: a stroke-rehab exoskeleton, retrained to apply eyelash extensions
A small startup took the safety engineering behind wearable rehab robots and pointed it at a beauty task done one hair at a time, inside real Ulta and Nordstrom stores.
I ran into a story about a robot doing eyelash extensions inside an Ulta store and almost skipped it as a gimmick, until I saw who built it. Nathan Harding previously co-founded Ekso Bionics, the company behind wearable exoskeletons that help stroke and spinal-cord patients relearn to walk. In that world, he has said, the wrong kind of robot can seriously hurt someone. His new startup, Luum, applied that same caution to eyelashes instead of limbs.
The pivot started with a mentor who described lash extensions as high-margin, habit-forming, and applied one hair at a time, a task Harding decided sits right at the edge of human dexterity after watching lash artists work on YouTube. That is exactly the kind of narrow, repetitive, precision job robotics tends to do well.
The clever part is how directly the exoskeleton background shows up in the hardware. The arm is built so it physically cannot reach a closed eyelid, and the wands that guide each lash are flexible and featherlight, held on by magnets deliberately weak enough to pop off if a client flinches or someone bumps the machine, so a lash artist can swap in a fresh wand and keep going. Working on both eyes at once, and trained on roughly 150 terabytes of session data, the machine has cut a service that normally runs an hour and a half to two hours down to about an hour, with a half-hour session as the next target.
Luum now runs studios in Dallas, Newport Beach, and Oakland, plus machines placed inside select Nordstrom and Ulta locations, with several lash artists staffing each robot to prep clients and finish the details it can't handle. CEO Jo Lawson calls the category "intelligent beauty services" and is already eyeing eyebrow shaping and microneedling next.
Whether it holds up across every eye shape is still an open question, one even lash professionals raise. But borrowing safety engineering built for people relearning to move, and pointing it at something as unglamorous as lash extensions, is a genuinely clever way to find a first market for dexterous robots.