When it comes to beauty products the phrase “try before you buy” used to require a visit to a physical store.

You’d dab a little highlighter from a tester pot or tube on your face, or rub some eye shadow on your eyelids, before checking them out in the mirror.

But with the pandemic shuttering High Street shops over the past year, a growing number of beauty fans have been flocking to digital testing apps and websites, to see whether a particular blusher or colour of lipstick suits them.

You typically pick the product you want to try out, look into your selfie camera, and it appears, digitally, on your face on the camera screen.

Amy Kean, a 38-year-old from Margate in Kent, says that, from her experience as a consumer, the technology, a form of augmented reality (AR), has greatly improved in recent years.

“It used to be very gimmicky… but now it is actually useful,” says the boss of business consultancy Six Things Impossible.