THE CONFLICTED ALGORITHM. WHO AI POWERED BEAUTY
RECOMMENDATIONS REALLY WORK FOR, STUDIED THROUGH
NYKAA’S SKIN SCAN

Asavari Agrawal

doi:10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i08.024

Title: THE CONFLICTED ALGORITHM. WHO AI POWERED BEAUTY RECOMMENDATIONS REALLY WORK FOR, STUDIED THROUGH NYKAA’S SKIN SCAN
Authors: Asavari Agrawal
Journal: International Journal of Social Science and Economic Research (IJSSER) ISSN: 2455-8834 Volume: 11 Issue: 8 Publication Date: August 2026 DOI: 10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i08.024
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Asavari Agrawal Inventure Academy, Bangalore, India
MLA 8 Agrawal, Asavari. "THE CONFLICTED ALGORITHM. WHO AI POWERED BEAUTY RECOMMENDATIONS REALLY WORK FOR, STUDIED THROUGH NYKAA’S SKIN SCAN." Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, vol. 11, no. 8, Aug. 2026, pp. 3969-3980, doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i08.024. Accessed Aug. 2026. APA 6 Agrawal, A. (2026, August). THE CONFLICTED ALGORITHM. WHO AI POWERED BEAUTY RECOMMENDATIONS REALLY WORK FOR, STUDIED THROUGH NYKAA’S SKIN SCAN. Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, 11(8), 3969-3980. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i08.024 Chicago Agrawal, Asavari. "THE CONFLICTED ALGORITHM. WHO AI POWERED BEAUTY RECOMMENDATIONS REALLY WORK FOR, STUDIED THROUGH NYKAA’S SKIN SCAN." Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research 11, no. 8 (August 2026), 3969-3980. Accessed August, 2026. https://doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i08.024.
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ABSTRACT: Beauty shopping in India has moved online at remarkable speed, and the platforms that lead it now use artificial intelligence to tell people what to buy. In November 2025 Nykaa launched Skin Scan, a tool that turns a selfie into what the company calls a personalised skin consultation and then recommends products. This paper asks a question the marketing does not answer. When the company that runs the AI advisor also owns many of the brands it could recommend and can earn a higher margin on those owned brands, whose interest does the recommendation serve. Drawing on published financial data, I show that Nykaa has a measurable reason to favour its own products, since third-party analysis estimates materially higher margins on owned brands than on comparable third-party products, though Nykaa does not disclose audited product-level margins. I argue this is a conflict of interest of the kind competition regulators have examined in marketplaces such as Amazon, but with a sharper edge, because a skin diagnostic borrows the authority of an expert and is harder to question. I then set out an original method, a paired scoring audit built around a Consumer Optimality Score and a Platform Incentive Score, that lets a researcher test whether these recommendations follow consumer value, platform value, or both. The paper contributes a framework and research design rather than a verdict and argues that the conflict is structural to vertically integrated beauty platforms rather than the fault of any single firm.

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