In November 2018, a Kenyan shopper could open Facebook Messenger, point her phone camera at her face and try a shade of Huddah Monroe’s lipstick without touching a tube. If she liked the colour, she could buy it through Cellulant’s Mula platform. Five years earlier, Huddah had faced reporters in Nairobi after viewers voted her out of Big Brother Africa. The woman remembered for a short stay in a televised house had become an early test case for how Africans might shop on a phone.

The interview waiting outside the house

Huddah was 21 when she returned from the 2013 competition. Kenyan viewers had a rather unforgiving point of comparison. Prezzo, who welcomed her home, had finished as runner-up the previous season. Capital FM reported that Huddah had made the earliest exit of any Kenyan contestant up to that point. A week of media interviews awaited her. Losing a popularity contest turned out to be quite a good way of finding out how many people wanted to talk to you.

She had an objection more serious than the vote. Images from the programme’s shower segment had circulated online. At her press conference she objected to their publication, and programme representatives threatened action against those who had published them. She also said she wished viewers had had longer to get to know her. Wanting more time on television and objecting to the circulation of particular pictures were two perfectly compatible positions, however inconvenient for the assembled press.

By the time Business Daily met her at Nairobi’s dusitD2 hotel in 2018, she had better material for an interview. Huddah Cosmetics had started with a few lipstick shades. By then the range included eleven, plus eye-shadow palettes and make-up wipes. She described a practical difficulty with developing colours for Black women: manufacturers were accustomed to formulating for lighter skin. A famous name on the tube could do precious little about what came out of it.

What the customer’s camera could do

The Cellulant experiment addressed a problem familiar to anyone who has bought make-up from a photograph. A lipstick shade displayed on a model tells a shopper something about the model. A swatch photographed on somebody else’s wrist demands another small act of faith. The Messenger tool let the buyer see a simulation on her own lips and move from trying a colour to ordering it. It could answer one important question before anybody paid for delivery.

It could hardly answer all of them. A camera cannot tell you how a lipstick feels after lunch. What made Huddah useful to the experiment was that she already had more than a million Instagram followers, according to Cellulant’s account to the payments publication PYMNTS. The technology company had a shopping tool to demonstrate. The beauty entrepreneur had an audience with a reason to try it. Neither partner had to invent a consumer who did not already exist.

There is an oddly satisfying way to measure the distance Huddah travelled in those five years. In 2013, somebody else controlled where the camera pointed, and she came home answering questions about the pictures. In 2018, a customer picked up her own phone, chose the colour and decided whether she liked what she saw. Huddah had finally found a screen on which the most commercially interesting face belonged to somebody else.