Yahoo Lifestyle AI ‘inspo’ is everywhere. It’s driving your hair stylist crazy.
Leah Langley-McClean, a wedding dress designer in Nashville, recently had a customer come in with a unique ask: She presented a photo of a floor-length white gown with an asymmetrical neckline, no sleeves and no back.
The dress defied the laws of physics, McClean told the bride-to-be. There was nothing in its structure to keep the bodice from falling off. The image had been generated by artificial intelligence, McClean explained, so the design would need some adjustments to exist in the real world.
The customer was adamant, however, and decided to go elsewhere, costing McClean a sale of around $2,000.
“Design isn’t just about creating something that’s visually pleasing,” the 36-year-old dressmaker said. “It also has to be possible.”
In the age of AI, the line between real and impossible seems to shift by the day. Thanks to publicly available tools like OpenAI’s Dall-E and Midjourney, AI-generated pictures have flooded the internet - and are now making their way into hair salons, plastic surgeons’ offices and other brick-and-mortar businesses where people like McClean’s bridal client ask professionals to re-create them.
The AI “inspo” - short for inspiration - customers find online often reflects unattainable standards or incorporates impossible details, making it hard for real-world businesses to meet clients’ demands. Scroll through Pinterest for bathroom renovation ideas and you might see a tub made from solid pink marble with an unearthly sheen. Search for wedding venues and you’ll find crystal chandeliers hanging from the roof of a greenhouse.
Customers asking for the impossible is nothing new. Before AI photos, people walked into hair salons with pictures of coiffed celebrities from magazines or heavily filtered online influencers, stylists said. Home and beauty retailers have long used Photoshop and computer generated imagery to make the fantastical look real-ish.
But AI’s easy accessibility, booming popularity and seemingly boundless creative leeway make it an especially sticky trap for people hunting for aspirational content, according to small business owners. On Pinterest and other platforms where people swap ideas for style, events and decor, breathtaking AI-generated images abound. But clients have no more knowledge about what’s possible and what they can afford.
Kelsi Horn, a spokeswoman for Pinterest, which has more than 500 million monthly active users globally, said the company has community guidelines which apply to all images whether they are AI-generated or not.
“AI-generated content currently makes up only a small percentage of the billions of pins on our platform,” Horn said.
Still, as of 2024, more than half of marketers were using generative AI in their strategies, according to Gartner research, with 47 percent using it for images in such places as social media ads. Many companies and social accounts don’t disclose when an image is altered or generated with AI, making it hard for people to spot the difference, said Gartner AI industry analyst Nicole Greene.
“We’re putting the onus on consumers to protect themselves in an environment where technology is changing how we differentiate real from fake in an unprecedented way,” Greene said.
And AI images can alter consumer expectations in important ways, she and others said.
“When [clients] want something, reality itself gets erased from their brains,” said New York-based hairstylist Jenni Robinson. She’s been in the industry for 20 years, and managing clients’ expectations has always been part of the gig. But for some customers, the explosion of AI inspo is widening the gulf between expectations and reality, she said, leaving creative professionals like her in the lurch.
Rita Contreras, a hairstylist in Brooklyn, said in the last six months, the number of clients walking in with AI images has ballooned. While the fake photos often fool her clients, Contreras can spot an AI image a mile away, she said; the details are too flawless, the hair too glossy.
“I have to just say, ‘This is not a real person. This is not real hair,’” Contreras said. She spends time before each appointment talking clients through the differences between AI hair (immune to bad lighting and weather) and real hair (vulnerable to both).
Before MacKenzie Page, 25, walks into a hair salon, she spends hours scrolling Pinterest for the perfect photo to show the stylist. The 15-year-old photo-sharing app has long been Page’s home base for beauty inspiration; in high school, it was the first place she saw other queer women with short haircuts, the Missouri native said.
But lately, something has felt off, she said: Her feed has been overtaken by shots of impossibly gorgeous women with poreless skin and bouncy hair. The images appear to be generated by AI, and Page guessed they now make up about half of the hair content she sees.
“I don’t want to save any fake images to my hair board, so I have to look at each one pretty closely,” she said, adding that she would be embarrassed to walk into the salon and ask for something that’s not realistic.
When a potential client approached event planner Deanna Evans with an AI-generated vision for her upcoming wedding, Evans couldn’t believe her eyes, she said. The imaginary venue was a lush wonderland, with green satin tablecloths under sprawling floral arrangements, soft professional lighting and trees growing out of the floor.
“It looked like the Met Gala,” Evans said. The idea would have run the client around $300,000, she guessed, which was four times her budget. Evans delicately explained the problem - and never heard from the woman again. Evans lost out on a five-figure paycheck, she estimated.
Some people go so far as to bring AI-generated images into plastic surgeons’ offices to demonstrate their ideal faces, said Keshav Magge, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Bethesda, Maryland, who has had patients bring in AI inspo for nose jobs or breast augmentations. Like AI images of women more broadly, these renderings tend to have lighter skin, bigger breasts and smaller, pert noses, he said.
“I’m nervous about it,” he said. “I’m worried it’s going to create unrealistic expectations.”
Even people who create their own AI images can be misled. For instance, a retail store owner may use Stable Diffusion to create mock-ups of a new storefront, an effort that once required the assistance of a designer but now can be done free online. But when they bring the resulting design to a professional, they are often shocked by the cost of bringing their dream to life, said Paris Venture, an artist who fabricates custom items for retailers.
Amid the AI onslaught, some customers and businesses are pushing back. Page, who has relied for a decade on Pinterest to collect and organize ideas for her hair, nails and home, said she’ll be looking elsewhere for inspo pics. If she’s going to pine after someone’s looks or life, she at least wants them to be real.
Lo Kalani, a hairstylist in Brooklyn, went a step further. She recently put a moratorium on AI photos among her clientele.
“I told them to stop bringing it in,” she said. “We’re trying to do creative work, and AI is just pushing perfection.
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