AI overview
The emergence of low-cost Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants and tools offers some new opportunities for hair and make-up designers for administrative duties in high-end television, allowing the team to get back to more creative tasks.
These are tools that support creativity, streamline workflows, and improve planning processes. AI assistants can act as a sounding board or visualiser, helping artists to; generate initial design concepts, experiment with style ideas virtually, compare and analyse designs to existing references (both historical and recorded) to ensure accurate designs and achieve consistency across multiple characters and scenes.
AI can also be used to help with planning, logistics and resource management. Systems like make-up inventory tracking and prediction of stock requirements for production, or scheduling and staff plans, are based directly on a script.
New opportunities are becoming possible for a make-up artist in high-end television can work alongside automated AI-based VFX tools, enabling the designer to create combinations of real make-up combined with virtual VFX components. Enabling direct integration of the make-up team into a VFX workflow, creating a transformation that simply wasn't feasible without great cost and time.
So what is AI?
Put simply, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a goal. It’s an ambition to program machines and software to behave in a way that seems human-like or is ‘intelligent’.
Rather than simply obeying instructions, AI systems aim to reason, learn, communicate and make decisions – mimicking the kind of traits we associate with humans.
Before you read further, have a look at the ScreenSkills AI 101 page (also linked in the resources section below).
“Ten or fifteen years ago, I didn’t have to worry about contracts and forms. Now I have to know exactly who’s working when, and for how long, and make sure that’s all processed.”
“It’s not just doing the job anymore — it’s admin, HR, budget, continuity and crew management.”
How are hair and make-up designers starting to use AI in 2025?
Script breakdown and early look development
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- AI can help break down a script and give you a sense of where key looks appear. Some tools can even generate thumbnails or colour markers across each page to help plan the journey of characters visually.
Visualising ideas and look variations
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- Generative AI could help you play with early design ideas (like wigs, skin tones or prosthetic shapes) well before you’re in the chair. It’s handy for trying out options quickly when time or resources are tight, and might give you alternative versions for things like crowd looks or background characters.
Mood boarding and reference management
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- AI could help organise and label all your references (photos, mood boards, sketches) so you’re not constantly trying to find “that one look” from four productions ago. You can also use it to search your own archive with images, not just words.
Script-inspired palette suggestions
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- Some tools can read a script and suggest historical or thematic textures, materials, and colour palettes that might fit, a bit like a second opinion.
Pitching and pre-vis
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- If you’re putting together a pitch or lookbook, AI can help take doodles or mood images into more polished visuals to communicate your ideas clearly, especially when working with other departments.
Audience impact testing
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- Some AI tools can give feedback on how a look might be received by audiences or where genre-specific styles carry meaning (think horror vs. period drama).
Continuity tracking
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- Great for teams spread across units or locations. Take a reference photo of a look from yesterday, and AI can compare it to today’s version. Flagging changes in brows, lips, prosthetics, or tone. Ideal for long shoots or scenes filmed out of order.
Training and quality control
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- For newer artists, AI can give a kind of “realism check” scoring the believability of a prosthetic edge or skin blend. Not a replacement for a trained eye, but helpful in developing one.
Logistics and setup planning
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- Some tools now help manage practical and administrative work like gear lists for on-location tents (parking, tables, chairs) based on crew numbers or even script demands.
Stock management and usage tracking
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- With a simple camera or scanner, you could start to log product use and forecast what you’ll need for the upcoming days. Eventually, AI might just re-order your lashes and alcohol palettes before you even know you’re low.
Environmental simulation
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- You can now preview how a look holds up in different weather or lighting (sun, sweat, dust, humidity), before committing to it. Especially useful for junior designers, or when the shoot is in demanding conditions.
Communication and admin help
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- AI can summarise meetings, keep track of action points, and help polish emails or documents, making sure you don’t miss anything and enabling you to focus on the creative.
Problem-solving and idea support
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- Whether it’s finding an alternative to a tricky brief or preparing for a tough production meeting, AI can help you brainstorm approaches or reframe challenges.
How is AI limited in helping a hair and make-up designer?
Actors will sit with hair and make-up artists for many hours before they are ready to be on set. This can be a crucial time for relationships, building conversations that help people to relax, and for them to prepare for their role ahead. Often, the actual design process itself can be critical for them to enter into character.
“For many performers, this is the moment that they inhabit a look.”
Giving artists confidence about themselves and truly understanding and interpreting what and how they feel about the hair and make-up is a crucial contribution, and one that (assuming that the application process remains broadly the same) it is unlikely AI will replace anytime soon, if ever.
"Unless you read the script and write it down, the importance doesn't land.”
AI assistants can be a brilliant tool to summarise and help highlight key script points or changes of note. But digging into the script and understanding it is still crucial. Rather than seeking to replace some of the laborious jobs with AI, it’s worth thinking about how they could be made more enjoyable, faster or easier to engage with – perhaps turning text into emotive visuals, for example.
Creating a hair and make-up design often involves many aspects of collaboration with others, so much effort is put into creating the right kind of environment where people can give their best contribution, truly bringing together ideas, bouncing thoughts around the team and feeding off the live performance happening right in front of you.
These things are very difficult for an AI to manage; crucially, the systems often don’t have access to the important real-time data, and secondly, the previous training data can be very poor. Being able to respond when things don’t quite go to plan means that many things are going to be managed by a human for quite some time.
AI can have a place supporting and enabling this to be even better, and perhaps creating new art forms alongside traditional film and TV. But, ultimately, as long as we continue to value collaboration, AI is not going to replace this creative drive or the authentic story and performance in high-end television.
Preparing for the future as a hair and make-up designer
To prepare for the future, hair and make-up designers can consider developing a working knowledge of AI-driven tools for communication, visualisation, design and concept development, continuity, quality, resource management and data analysis.
Learning how to use AI to catalogue, label and archive your own data could help benefit your department. As a freelancer, you could also consider including working drawings along with images and videos of the completed look. These and the costings, plans, schedules and timings of production will help enable you to train AI in the future to automate tasks or assist in providing useful estimates to other departments. Perhaps in the future you may be able to have your own department AI assistant that can answer common external requests, for already shot materials, like photos and lookbooks.
VFX workflows in high-end television are changing dramatically through AI automation; therefore, understanding what you “want it to look like” is becoming more important than being able to actually “make the video clip look that way”. Freelancers may have the opportunity to access these broader roles in the future.
By becoming proficient in AI-enhanced design software and self-hosted AI models, designers can leverage these tools to maximise creative output, custom AI content generation and data security.
Staying aware of how technology might start to be integrated directly into the make-up process in the future could also have some value. For example, it would already be possible with today’s technology to use AR overlays to show you the final ‘finished VFX result’ directly through digital glasses, whilst you apply make-up, or highlight continuity disparity from yesterday in real-time. Giving you an instant comparison reference or helping to blend the virtual elements with the real ones.
Engaging in training through ScreenSkills and other online resources will be valuable for hair and make-up designers aiming to stay at the forefront of the industry. Hair and make-up designers who embrace these new technologies will be better equipped for productions. Delivering a blend of technical understanding and precision with great creative flair.
Embracing AI in hair and make-up design
AI offers hair and make-up designers exciting opportunities to innovate, save time, and ensure precision in their craft. While AI can assist with design generation, continuity tracking, and logistics, the human skill of interpreting character nuances and bringing creative visions to life remains irreplaceable. Designers who embrace AI as a collaborative tool can enhance their workflows and deliver even greater impact on screen. For those working in high-end TV and film, AI can be an empowering resource that supports creativity and elevates storytelling through enhanced visual design.
Links to other ScreenSkills resources
Discover the hair and make-up designer job profiles in:
Read the hair and make-up designer skills checklist
Explore more AI-related training, events and opportunities with ScreenSkills
Read AI 101, an overview of some aspects of AI in the UK film and TV industry