Every lipstick shade you’ve ever bought was mixed for nobody in particular. The tube in your bag is a compromise worked out for an average face, and the reason the same red looks warm on your friend and off on you is simple: your lips aren’t the same color underneath, so the shade lands differently.
Kolmar Korea built a gadget that starts from your actual lips instead. ChromaFlow is a lipstick-shaped device with an AI optical sensor in its base, and it just took the Best of Innovation award in Beauty Tech at CES 2027.
Best of Innovation is the top tier at CES, the highest score in its category, and ChromaFlow also picked up a separate Innovation Award in AI. Beauty Tech only became a category in 2025, and Kolmar has now won its top prize two years running.
A shade mixed for one face
Press the device to your lips and the sensor reads your lip color and condition. The AI then works out a mixing ratio for your face specifically, because it’s predicting how the finished shade will actually look on your lips rather than in the tube. That prediction is the whole trick, and it’s the part no beauty counter can do by eye.
The sensor lives in the base, the black disc ringed with green lights in Kolmar’s photos. It takes the reading the whole mix depends on.
Shade matching has always been a guess. This is the first version that isn’t.
Seven color cartridges sit inside the body, and the device blends them to your ratio on the spot. Start to finish, the lip product is ready in under a minute.
The center of the body is translucent, so you can watch the colors swirl together while it works. It’s a small thing, and it’s also the best part: you see your shade being made instead of trusting a label.
CES’s own listing calls it a handheld cosmetic manufacturing system, and that framing is the tell. This isn’t a smarter lipstick. It’s a tiny factory that happens to be shaped like one, and the shade it makes exists for exactly one customer.
Recreate the shade you saw on screen
The demo Kolmar keeps coming back to is the influencer test. You see a lip color in a video, you want that exact shade, and any tube you buy only gets you close, because your lips shift the result. Every beauty video has the same comment under it: what shade is that? ChromaFlow starts from the shade you want, then adjusts the mix for your own lips, so the color that lands is the color you picked.
Kolmar keeps taking this category
If the name sounds familiar, it isn’t because of lipstick. Kolmar Korea is one of the world’s biggest cosmetics manufacturers, the factory behind other brands’ products for more than 30 years, an ODM giant that makes the makeup other companies put their names on.
Last year’s winner, the Scar Beauty Device, treated skin and covered scars in a single pass, and Kolmar’s CAIOME scalp reader picked up CES honors before that. ChromaFlow has company this year too: LumiJet Pro reads skin condition and thickness, then delivers active ingredients to the depth they’re needed, and it took an Innovation Award in AI.
Kolmar’s bigger play is the data. Every scan feeds a beauty tech platform the company is building across ChromaFlow, the Scar Beauty Device and CAIOME, tying skin diagnosis, formula design and manufacturing into one system. Your lip reading stops being a one-off mix and starts being a profile.
What’s still missing
Here’s what nobody can tell you yet: the price, the size, and the day you might buy one. Kolmar hasn’t published any of it. ChromaFlow is a platform demo from a company that usually sells manufacturing to brands, so the open question isn’t just what it costs, it’s whose name ends up on the box if it reaches stores at all.
No price, no date, no specs. Just a booth in January.
See it in Las Vegas
ChromaFlow will be mixing shades live at CES 2027, January 6 to 9 in Las Vegas, at Kolmar’s booth 56139 in the Venetian Expo, and LumiJet Pro will be working the same booth. It’s one of the stranger stops on the show watch so far, in a field that already includes LG’s transparent OLED and wallpaper TVs. A lipstick machine belongs on that list next to the TVs and foldables: nobody else at the show is doing this.
I can’t buy one yet, and I don’t know what it costs. I do know the beauty counter ritual of swiping a shade on your hand and guessing is overdue for a replacement, and a sensor that reads your lips before it mixes is the first replacement that makes sense to me.
