AR FILTER · CREATIVE-TECH · SOCIAL
The hardest thing to demonstrate digitally is a haircare product's effect on your hair. Sunsilk Serum AR made it possible — live, on your face, on Snapchat.
The Challenge
Sunsilk — Unilever Pakistan's leading haircare brand — was launching its Serum range and faced the fundamental marketing challenge of all haircare products: the product's benefit (smoother, shinier, more manageable hair) is invisible in digital advertising. You can show before-and-after imagery, but consumers know these are managed photo shoots. The gap between 'seeing the product's effect in an ad' and 'believing it will work on my hair' is the defining conversion barrier in haircare digital marketing.
The target audience — women aged 18–35 in Pakistan — had become sophisticated consumers of beauty advertising. They could identify retouched hair imagery instantly, and their decision-making was increasingly driven by peer recommendations and personal trial rather than brand advertising. A format that let them see the Serum effect on their own hair — before purchase — would close the consideration gap that no visual ad format had closed.
The technical challenge: hair AR is among the most complex augmented reality implementations. Unlike face filters (which apply to a relatively flat, well-tracked surface), hair AR requires tracking a constantly moving, variable-shaped volume with real-time reflection and texture rendering — capabilities that most AR studios in Pakistan did not possess.
The Solution
Happy Ads built Pakistan's first haircare AR try-on for Sunsilk Serum — a Snapchat Lens that applied the Serum's hair transformation effect to the user's own hair in real time. Using Snapchat's hair segmentation and AR rendering capabilities in Lens Studio, the filter detected the user's hair and applied a Sunsilk Serum transformation: glossier texture, smoother appearance, reduced frizz — all rendered live, on the user's actual hair, as they moved their head.
The creative execution was designed to feel like a mirror, not a filter: the goal was to show the realistic Serum effect with enough fidelity that users could genuinely imagine the product working on their hair. Sunsilk's brand elements were integrated into the Lens's UI rather than overlaid on the hair transformation — keeping the hair itself the focus of the experience.
The filter ran on Snapchat with paid Lens distribution to Pakistan's female 18–35 audience. Organic sharing was driven by the 'show a friend what you'd look like with Sunsilk Serum hair' mechanic — a natural social sharing prompt that generated earned media reach on top of the paid campaign.
Key Results
First
Haircare AR Try-On in Pakistan
Real-time
Hair Transformation — User's Actual Hair
Snapchat
Hair Segmentation + Lens Studio
Zero
Gap Between Seeing and Believing
Key Insights
01
AR Try-On Closes the Gap Between Advertising Exposure and Purchase Intent Better Than Any Other Format
Haircare consumer research consistently identifies 'uncertainty about results on my specific hair type' as the primary barrier to first purchase. An AR try-on that shows the product's effect on the user's own hair — not a model's, not a retouched photograph — directly addresses this barrier. When a woman sees Sunsilk Serum's effect on her hair in real time, she has experienced the product's benefit without buying it. The conversion from this experience to purchase intent is structurally higher than from any passive exposure format.
02
Hair AR Technical Complexity Creates a Competitive Moat for Brands That Move First
Building high-quality hair AR requires capabilities (hair segmentation, real-time texture rendering, lighting adaptation) that most AR studios cannot deliver. First movers in haircare AR establish differentiation that competitors cannot quickly copy. Sunsilk Serum's AR try-on makes every subsequent haircare brand that attempts a digital campaign without AR look less advanced. Happy Ads' technical capability in hair AR is a commercial asset for the haircare brands we partner with.
03
Beauty-Tech AR in Pakistan Is Ahead of Most MENA Markets — and Brands Aren't Capitalising Yet
Pakistan's Snapchat user base has one of the highest Lens interaction rates in the MENA region. Yet Pakistan's beauty and personal care brands have barely begun to use AR try-on formats. The global beauty-tech market has demonstrated that AR try-on increases time-on-site by 3× and purchase conversion by 20–25% in e-commerce contexts. Pakistani beauty brands that adopt AR try-on now will build consumer experience advantages that take years for competitors to close.