Makeup Studio — Face Paint for Kids

Children do not think in categories

Watch a small child with a makeup game and they never go looking for the eyeshadow tool. They grab a colour and put it on the face. So the dock is not organised by body part at all: the axes are colour, shape, glitter, tattoo and sticker, and the face is a canvas rather than a form to fill in. Hair is the one exception, because a hairstyle only has one place it can go.

A brush you can see, and shapes

The first tool is a plain brush, and you hold a lipstick on screen while you use it — its tip is where the paint lands. Passes build up and colours genuinely mix, so blue dragged across red comes out purple rather than blue. The rest are shapes: a mouth, a swoosh of eyeshadow, a cheek blob, a lash fan, a stripe of war paint. A child who cannot draw a mouth can still put a mouth on. Drag and the shape repeats along the path; the whole drag is one stroke, so undo takes the entire line back.

And the face is putty

The last tool pulls the face about with a finger, like a sculpture that never sets. The field behind it is a backward map: each point on screen remembers which part of the picture to fetch, so dragging pulls those coordinates back and the content comes forward. Storing it that way answers the awkward question for free — where on the real picture did the child just touch? — which is why paint put on after a pull still lands under the finger, and paint put on before it stretches along with the face. A second tool rubs it back towards how it started.

It knows where a face is

Load a photo and MediaPipe's face landmarker finds 478 points on it, which are framed into a portrait crop and turned into regions the hair colour can follow. The model and its runtime are served from the site itself, so detection runs entirely in the browser and no photograph is ever uploaded anywhere.

• Pick a colour and a brush or shape, then put it wherever you want
• Colours mix where strokes cross, the way paint does
• Hold still and drag up to grow a shape, without interrupting painting
• Nineteen characters — princesses and fairies, heroes, rappers, animals
• Ten hairstyles, recolourable, applied with one tap
• Glitter, tattoos and stickers on the same free placement
• Or use a photo: face detection runs on the device and never uploads it
• Undo, wipe clean, save to a gallery, download the picture
• Turkish and English, installable and playable offline

Built for a thumb

The layout is written for a phone held in one hand and widens into four columns on a desktop, and the brush size is three plainly different circles that never scroll out of reach. Nothing is downloaded to make noise: the sounds are synthesised, and the brush is one continuous bed of filtered noise steered by how fast the finger is moving, because a row of separate notes turned a smooth movement into a stutter.