Alta has signed a year-long exclusive integration with Elf Beauty, allowing users to place Elf products on their AI avatars, save items to wishlists, and follow links to buy on Elf’s direct-to-consumer site. The move shifts Alta from a fashion-first discovery tool toward a broader virtual self-expression platform where beauty products are part of an outfit rather than only a shade match.
Alta launched as a digital closet and stylist that digitizes users’ wardrobes, generates personalized outfit recommendations, and lets people try looks on avatars. Founder and CEO Jenny Wang says Alta’s user base, now in the millions, manually uploaded "hundreds of thousands" of beauty products, and 76% of users requested the ability to apply makeup and fragrances to their avatars. Alta will surface Elf products inside its Discover feed and try-on mode, profile new drops, pin editorial looks to Elf calendar moments, and highlight top creators from Elf’s "Beauty Squad" community.
Elf Beauty is the corporate parent of Elf, Rhode, Naturium, and Well People. The brand has already tested AI tools and virtual worlds, partnering with Pinterest on a color analysis tool last year and working with Nylon on an AI beauty chatbot. In gaming, Elf launched a virtual world, Elf UP!, on Roblox in 2023 and experimented with selling real-world products alongside digital twins in 2024. It also released Glow Up!, a Roblox makeup game that lets players style high-fidelity avatars. Elf CMO Patrick O’Keefe frames the Alta deal as a response to user signals: "When we see a signal, we want to jump into the signal." He adds that the brand will gauge success by "showing up for our community and building that zero distance."
Alta is not planning to enable in-app transactions soon. Wang says the company is focused on discovery, rolling out new feed and recommendation features and a "taste fingerprint" AI model that predicts a user’s next five purchases based on behavior in the app. For Elf, the integration is a bet on exposure inside a fashion-minded community rather than an immediate commerce conversion engine.
The partnership points to a widening definition of virtual try-on, one that treats beauty as part of curated digital identity. For now Alta supplies the canvas and recommendations, while Elf supplies the products and measurement: both companies will test whether avatar-led discovery leads users from experimentation to real-world purchases.
