Free
People facing hair loss
They bring the need and the photos. Charging them at the hardest moment is wrong, and they are the reason shops and hospitals pay.
For retailers and wig banks
A fitting that starts before the shop opens.
Wigs are one of the few beauty products people can rarely return once worn, bought at the worst moment, matched from memory. Hairloom moves the choosing earlier and puts it on the shopper’s own face. Here is who pays, what it costs and how we would prove it.
Who pays
Per client brief
Wig boutiques and fitters
A passport, the shortlist on the client's face and the cap size arrive before the first visit. Draft pilot price: ₹399 a client plus GST, against ₹173–₹198 of API cost.
Per studio session, via the widget
Wig brands and online shops
A “see it after hair loss” panel beside each product, free to show, and a door into the studio with that wig first. Draft price: ₹99 for a shop session on the shopper's own photo: a light passport and two try-ons, capped at 10 units (about ₹42–48 of API cost).
Sponsored passports
Hospitals, wig banks and CSR
Every patient gets a passport at diagnosis: 22 units, about ₹93 of API cost. At a sponsor price of ₹150, 500 patients cost ₹75,000. Health care is an eligible CSR activity under section 135 of India's Companies Act.
Insurers are a later step: in the US, some private plans reimburse a wig prescribed as a “cranial prosthesis”, and a passport could support that claim with photos and measurements. Prices here are drafts for a pilot, not offers.
What one fitting costs
Unit costs from YouCam’s price list: $0.048 a unit on the 500-unit subscription ($0.046 at 10,000 a month), $0.055 pay as you go. The table is built from the same task list the studio runs, and matches the MCP server’s fitting_cost tool.
A lighter passport (curl, frizz, length only) is 6 units. The face reading is optional and the dearest single step, at 10 units. Skin check-ins in the journal are 9 units each, so we suggest one per treatment cycle.
Chemotherapy or alopecia: a full passport, the shortlist on her face and the extras a fitter brief carries.
41 units$1.97–2.26 a client
| Step | YouCam API | Times | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curl pattern | AI Hair Type Detection | 1 | 2 |
| Frizz | AI Hair Frizziness Detection | 1 | 2 |
| Length | AI Hair Length Detection | 1 | 2 |
| Face shape and brows (optional) | AI Face Attribute & Ratio Analyzer | 1 | 10 |
| Wig try-ons | AI Hairstyle Virtual Try-On | 8 | 16 |
| Own hair, restored | AI Hairstyle Virtual Try-On | 1 | 2 |
| Recolour to closer shades | AI Hair Color Virtual Try-On | 3 | 3 |
| Headwear | AI Image Generator (image to image) | 3 | 3 |
| Rebuilt brows | AI Makeup Virtual Try-On | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 41 |
For a boutique: does it pay?
Move the assumptions. Every figure that isn’t from a price list or a source is labelled as one.
It pays for itself if one client a month buys one more wig.
Fitter time alone saves ₹4,500 against ₹11,970 of briefs, so the case rests on extra wigs sold. That is the first thing the pilot measures.
The boutique, a month
Fitter time saved₹4,50011.3 h
Margin on extra wigs₹12,6001.5 wigs at ₹8,400
Paid for briefs−₹11,97030 × ₹399
Boutique’s net₹5,130break-even at 0.89 extra wigs a month
Hairloom, a month
YouCam API cost−₹5,9531230 units at $0.055
Kept before hosting and payment fees₹6,01750% of fees
Clients, a month
Unworn wigs not bought₹50,400saved by clients, not the shop
Why this is a market for YouCam
Hairloom sells the same hair try-ons Perfect Corp already sells to beauty brands, to buyers who need them more: people losing hair, and the shops and hospitals who fit them. Chemotherapy is where the need is sharpest; thinning is where the volume is.
The volume market. Toppers, volumisers and clip-ins sell to them long before any wig. Hair Volume and Hair Extension try-ons show fuller hair and clip-in length on their own photo.
Patches that come and go. A monthly photo record and a topper-or-wig plan, which the journal's alopecia mode already gives.
Chemotherapy and medical buyers: wig brands, boutiques, wig banks and hospitals. They buy on trust and fit, which is what the passport and fitter brief carry.
What we’d ask Perfect Corp for, from building this, is on the evidence page: men’s volume templates, a crown topper template, and a measured hair colour.
An eight-week pilot in India
- Weeks 1–2One oncology centre's wig bank or boutique in Pune or Mumbai. Staff trained on the fitter desk; consent wording reviewed with the centre.
- Weeks 3–6Passports offered at the first chemotherapy appointment, before hair loss. Fitter briefs used for every fitting.
- Weeks 7–8Compare with the previous two months: fitting visits per client, minutes per fitting, wigs worn at four weeks, and how clients felt about choosing.
It works if, after eight weeks
60%of patients offered a passport keep one before their hair falls out
−25%fitting visits per client, against the two months before
80%of wigs bought are still worn at four weeks
Organisations already doing this work include the Tata Memorial Centre with the Cherian Foundation, which give donated-hair wigs to patients, and Cope with Cancer in Mumbai, which makes free wigs for women on chemotherapy. A passport helps them match a donated wig to the person. We haven’t contacted them yet.
Health data, handled like health data
Using Hairloom can reveal a cancer diagnosis, which India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the GDPR treat with care. So there are no accounts, photos are kept on the device and sent to YouCam only to process them, YouCam tasks are deleted after each result, and fitter links are encrypted end to end. A hospital deployment would add a consent record and a data-processing agreement.