Secret Shopper review: here’s what happened when we let Cult Beauty’s AI concierge choose our beauty haul
Cult Beauty has brought AI into its shopping experience with personalised product and routine recommendations. RTIH’s Secret Shopper puts Cult Concierge to the test, buys its suggestions and finds out whether the advice still holds up when the parcel arrives.
Beauty shopping has never suffered from a shortage of choice. My problem is usually the opposite: I can happily spend an unreasonable amount of time comparing three almost identical bronzers before deciding I need none of them, only to buy something completely different ten minutes later.
So Cult Beauty putting an AI beauty adviser into its shopping experience was always going to get my attention. Cult Concierge introduces itself as a beauty intelligence insider and promises tailored guidance on ingredients, products and routines, so I decided the only fair way to test it was to treat it as though I was starting from scratch, give it plenty of information about me and see whether I trusted its recommendations enough to spend money on them.
I told it that I have very fair skin with a cool undertone, that my skin could do with more hydration, the sort of makeup I normally wear and some of the brands and products that already work well for me. I also gave it different budgets depending on what I was shopping for, because there is not much value in an AI recommending the perfect £70 product when you have already said you want to spend £30.
The result was one of the more useful retail AI experiences I have tried, although there are still some fairly significant usability issues for Cult Beauty to iron out.
Starting from scratch
One thing Cult Concierge does well immediately is give you somewhere to begin. Rather than opening on an intimidating empty chat box, it suggests the types of questions you might want to ask, including help building a skincare routine, finding products for your skin type, discovering new arrivals or talking through your current beauty favourites.
That sounds simple, but it matters. Plenty of people will be curious about using AI for shopping without necessarily knowing what constitutes a useful prompt, and the suggested questions make the experience much more approachable.
Once I started talking to it properly, it handled context fairly well. I mentioned products I already use successfully, including my preference for certain lightweight complexion products, and asked for similar recommendations around the £30 mark. It suggested options including Huda Beauty and Rare Beauty, while also throwing Saie Glowy Super Gel into the mix. I would not personally describe Glowy Super Gel as a foundation, but rather something I would wear underneath one or on a foundation-free day, although it happens to be a product I already love.
That was an early indication of what Cult Concierge does well and where it occasionally stretches things. The recommendations generally made sense for me, even if the product category was not always absolutely precise.
This is where AI beats a filter
The bronzer search was where I started to see why a conversational shopping tool can be more useful than simply filtering a product page.
I wanted both cream and powder, something that would work on very fair, cool-toned skin and, crucially, something that would not feel intimidating to use. Cult Concierge initially suggested several options, including products from Saie after I had already told it I liked the brand.
It then recommended the PATRICK TA Major Sculpt Crème Contour & Powder Bronzer Duo. That immediately caught my attention because it solved two problems at once: the cream and powder are paired together, the shades are designed to work together and the price was close enough to the budget I had given it that I was happy to consider it.
What impressed me more was that it did not simply throw a product card at me and wait for the sale. It explained how I could use the cream first and then lightly apply the powder over it for longevity, before asking whether I wanted recommendations for brushes that would work with both textures. Naturally, I said yes.
Cult Concierge initially stayed fairly close to the spending range I had already established and suggested some more affordable Morphe options. I then deliberately changed the brief and told it that I was happy to spend more on brushes, simply to see whether it would understand that the constraint had changed.
It did. The next round of recommendations moved into significantly more expensive territory, including options from Hourglass, Westman Atelier and Patrick Ta.
That sort of adjustment is where this starts to become more useful than a normal set of filters. I did not have to go backwards, change a price slider and start browsing again. I simply changed my mind in the conversation and the recommendations changed with me.
Very good at helping, and very good at selling
There is, unsurprisingly, a commercial layer running through the whole experience.
After helping me choose brushes, Cult Concierge asked whether I wanted advice on how to clean and care for them so that they would last. That is helpful information, but it is also an obvious opportunity to move the conversation from bronzer to brushes and potentially on again to brush-care products.
The interesting thing is that it rarely felt forced. The follow-up questions were relevant to what I was already discussing, and that makes the selling much more effective than dropping unrelated recommendations into the conversation.
For retailers, this is potentially very powerful. Traditional e-commerce relies heavily on sections such as “You may also like” or “Customers also bought”, whereas conversational AI can work out what the next logical purchase might be from what the shopper has actually said.
From my side of the screen, though, it still needs to feel as though the advice is useful first and commercial second. Cult Concierge mostly managed that balance.
I deliberately gave it something it couldn’t sell me
I also wanted to see what happened when the product I was interested in was not readily available through Cult Beauty.
I had been looking at Medik8 Advanced Day Eye Protect and mentioned it while asking for help with dehydration, fine lines and the hollow appearance under my eyes. I did this deliberately because I already knew the exact Medik8 product I wanted was not available for me to buy through Cult Beauty.
To its credit, Cult Concierge could still discuss the product and explain why it might suit what I was looking for. The problem came when I asked it to give me a link to buy it. At that point the conversation became considerably less useful, because there was nowhere within the Cult Beauty catalogue for it to send me.
Instead, it started steering me towards alternatives it could actually sell, including Kiehl’s Creamy Eye Treatment with Avocado.
That exposes an important limitation of retailer-owned AI. Cult Concierge can give personalised beauty recommendations, but it is still giving them from inside a shop. It is not searching every beauty retailer and deciding which product anywhere on the market is objectively the best option for you.
I do not think that is inherently a problem. It would be slightly strange for Cult Beauty to build an AI assistant primarily designed to send customers somewhere else. But shoppers need to understand the distinction between an independent beauty adviser and a very sophisticated sales assistant.
The product I didn’t expect to like
The Kiehl’s recommendation was particularly interesting because I was not convinced by it.
I had gone into the conversation wanting the Medik8 product and, based on what I already knew about the formulas, I was not expecting the Kiehl’s eye cream to impress me quite as much. I bought it anyway because that was rather the point of this experiment: there was no point asking AI to choose products for me and then ignoring everything it suggested.
So far, I am very pleasantly surprised. The Creamy Eye Treatment with Avocado is extremely hydrating and has been working well under my eyes. I am going to finish the pot before making any grand claims about long-term results, but instead of immediately replacing it with the Medik8 product I originally intended to buy, I am happy to keep using it and see how I get on.
That is exactly the sort of result Cult Beauty presumably wants from this tool. It introduced me to something I probably would not have chosen independently and, having actually used it, I am pleased that it did.
And then I accidentally lost everything
This is also where we reach the biggest problem I found with Cult Concierge, and for me it is an important one.
My original conversation had been long. We had discussed my skin, undertone, makeup preferences, budgets and existing favourites, and the assistant had recommended around seven or eight products that I wanted to go back and look at properly later.
I went about the rest of my day assuming I could return to that conversation when I was ready.
At some point, I managed to start a new chat using a plus control at the top of the screen and the conversation disappeared. I could not find an obvious way of reopening the old thread, and with it went all those individual recommendations I had been planning to revisit.
Cult Concierge does have a memory option and mine was switched on, which meant it retained some of the information it had learnt about me between sessions. When I asked for previous recommendations again, however, it could not simply restore the original conversation or reproduce the complete list it had previously given me. That is a significant weakness for this type of technology.
The whole advantage of an AI shopping assistant is that the conversation builds value over time. If I have spent 15 or 20 minutes explaining my skin type, undertone, budget and preferences, and the system has surfaced eight products I might eventually buy, those recommendations should be extremely easy to find again.
Whether there is some form of conversation history hidden elsewhere that I simply could not locate, I cannot say. But if it exists, it was not obvious enough for me to recover the chat when I needed it.
A saved conversation history, a persistent “recommended for you” section or even the ability to save individual AI recommendations separately would make Cult Concierge considerably stronger. From Cult Beauty’s point of view, there is also a commercial argument for fixing it: losing the conversation did not only frustrate me, it potentially lost the retailer several purchases I had been considering.
The recommendations arrive
Once I had finally made my choices, I ended up ordering the Patrick Ta bronzer duo, the Kiehl’s eye treatment, a PDRN lip serum duo and a Danessa Myricks lip gloss.
As a Cult Beauty Gold member, I was expecting next-working-day delivery, but I was particularly impressed that my parcel turned up on the Saturday. My order was delivered by Relay and the tracking experience was excellent, with WhatsApp updates throughout and increasingly precise information as the driver got closer.
I am already a fan of delivery services that tell me what is actually happening rather than giving me a 12-hour window and asking me to hope for the best, and this was one of the better experiences I have had. By the time the driver was only a few stops away, I knew about it.
The more important test, though, was whether Cult Concierge had actually chosen products I liked. On that front, it did very well.
So, did the AI get my beauty haul right?
The Patrick Ta duo does exactly what I wanted it to do. Having cream and powder together makes it easy to use, the formulas work beautifully as a pair and the shade suits my colouring.
The Danessa Myricks gloss was another. I had told Cult Concierge that I already liked Danessa Myricks products and asked whether there was anything else from the brand worth trying. We eventually settled on a lip gloss and it helped steer me towards cooler-toned shades, including the Pink Sorbet option I bought.
I love it. It is glossy, highly pigmented, lasts surprisingly well for the type of product it is and the colour works beautifully on me. On that recommendation, the AI gets a straightforward 10/10.
The Anua PDRN lip duo is good, although I would describe that recommendation a little differently. I was looking for something to help with dry lips and, while I like the product, I think of it more as a lip gloss with treatment benefits than a dedicated intensive lip treatment. The ingredients add skincare credentials, but for me its primary talent is still being a nice gloss rather than replacing the best lip treatments I already use.
And then there is the Kiehl’s eye cream, which may actually be the most convincing recommendation of the lot simply because I expected not to be persuaded by it. It is incredibly hydrating without feeling heavy, absorbs beautifully into the skin and has a lovely smooth application that works really well under makeup rather than causing concealer to crease or slide around.
The hydration also lasts throughout the day, which is exactly what I was hoping for from an eye cream. So far, Cult Concierge was absolutely right to put it in front of me.
Useful, but not particularly fast
There was one other issue I noticed throughout the test: Cult Concierge can be quite slow.
I use general-purpose AI systems regularly, so compared with tools such as ChatGPT or Claude, there were moments where Cult Concierge felt noticeably less responsive. It was not so slow that I gave up, but there was enough of a delay that I noticed it repeatedly.
I could not establish which AI model or technology sits underneath the interface, so I cannot say whether that speed comes from the underlying model or from the additional work Cult Beauty is doing to retrieve products, check its catalogue and build recommendations around them.
From a shopper’s perspective, the technical reason does not really matter. Once consumers become accustomed to near-instant responses from mainstream AI products, retail implementations are going to be judged against the same standard.
The verdict
Overall, I think Cult Concierge is a very good addition to the Cult Beauty shopping experience.
Most importantly, it actually added something. This was not AI inserted into a retailer’s app so that somebody could put “AI powered” into a press release. It helped me narrow down products, adapted when I changed my budget, understood brands I already liked, gave useful application advice and persuaded me to try products I probably would not have discovered on my own.
Several of those recommendations also stood up once I actually used them, which is a much more meaningful test than whether the chatbot sounded convincing.
There are still clear limitations. The advice is naturally centred on the products Cult Beauty can sell, the response speed could improve and the way conversations and recommendations can disappear is, for me, the biggest functionality issue. If Cult Beauty wants shoppers to build an ongoing relationship with its AI adviser, those conversations need to feel persistent rather than disposable.
The strongest endorsement I can probably give it is that I will use it again. I do not need AI to tell me how to shop for beauty, but I am very happy for it to help me discover things I might otherwise have ignored, particularly when its success rate so far has been this good.
Next time, though, I will be saving anything I really like before I dare touch that plus button.
Secret Shopper rating: 4 out of 5 stars
