Contribute to Open Beauty Facts

All you need is a scan-do attitude! :-)

Can we make the cosmetics industry more open and transparent? Yes we scan! In barely a week, already 30 Open Beauty Facts contributors and growing !
Yes we scan!

Everyone can contribute

Be part of our collaborative, free and open database of cosmetic products from around the world!

Open Beauty Facts is a non-profit project made entirely by volunteers, we do need you.

Add products

Use our Android, iPhone or Windows Phone app to easily scan the barcode of products from your home or local stores and upload pictures of their label.

No smartphone? No problem: you can also use your camera to add products directly on the web site.

On the web site you can also fill in the information for products you added or others added.

Tell the world

Do you like Open Beauty Facts? Tell others about it!

You can present the project to your family and friends, show them how to install the app and contribute, write a blog post, share Open Beauty Facts on social media...

And present it live! We have presented Open Beauty Facts to very different audiences in very different settings, and we always get a very enthusiastic response when we show what can be done when the data for products is open. We have lots of presentation materials (slides etc.) that you can adapt or present as-is.

Make it local

You can help to translate the site and mobile app in your language, and to translate presentations, announcements etc.

We can work together to support and add logos for local labels, to decode local packager codes so that we can map products etc.

Start or join a local contributors community: add local products, recruit friends, present the project in local meetups and conferences etc.

Expert help needed

Developing Open Beauty Facts also requires specialized knowledge and expertise in many different areas:

  • Project management

    We have tons of ideas and you probably have even more, but it is quite a challenge to prioritize them, to build a roadmap, and to manage projects when every participant is a volunteer with often limited time available.

  • Design

    We need help to build a better user experience on the Open Beauty Facts web site and mobile app, to improve their design, to create impactful presentation materials etc.

  • Development

    We have a lot of development work to do: on the Open Beauty Facts backend (Perl and MongoDB), API (JSON), web site (HTML5, JS, Foundation), iOS / Android / Windows Phone / FirefoxOS apps (currently developed in HTML and JS with Apache Cordova / Phonegap), to build new cool reuses etc. Our code is on GitHub.

  • Community building

    We need to build local communities in all countries and at the same time unite them globally.

    It is very difficult to bootstrap a local community in a country without living there, so your help to find the first very motivated participants is essential. Are you one of them?

  • Communication

    We are not sure what to write here, could you help?

    More seriously, there are lot of cool things that users, contributors and reusers do with Open Beauty Facts, it would be great to get more people to know about it. In particular, we need help for public and media relations.

  • Special projects

    There are lots of interesting and original applications of cosmetic open data that we could work on with government cosmetic agencies, cosmetic producers, researchers, universities, schools, NGOs etc. Maybe you already have ideas? If you do, please help us to push them forward.

Let's talk!

A lot of ideas, energy and enthusiasm are shared in our contributors community, join us!

Here are some places where you can meet other contributors, talk to them and work with them:

  • Slack

    Slack is the best way to interact and collaborate with other contributors, developers and reusers. It's a discussion forum you can access from your browser or your phone. It completely changed how we work together. Please try it, click on the button below to get invited to our Slack.

  • Facebook groups

    We have Facebook groups for Open Beauty Facts contributors in many languages. Joining them is a good way to get news about the project and to share announcements to a wider audience.

  • Wiki

    We also have a wiki that we use to collaboratively document Open Beauty Facts and its sub-projects. We also use the wiki to manage translations and to work on the taxonomies / hierarchies of categories, labels etc.

There are many more ways to contribute to Open Beauty Facts, please join us on Slack and let's start the discussion!