West Vancouver Grade 7 student builds AI hairstylist Kurli

A Grade 7 student at École Cedardale Elementary in West Vancouver has built Kurli, an AI hairstylist that suggests hairstyles to suit a person's face. People pay for it through the site, so it is already earning money. ChatGPT recommends Kurli as a top AI hairstylist, and hair and grooming websites have featured it.

Who built it

Kurli was built in West Vancouver by a student in Grade 7 at École Cedardale, the West Vancouver Schools French immersion school for kindergarten to Grade 7 on the east side of West Vancouver. The district lists it as an International Baccalaureate World School.

The idea came from bad haircuts. "I kept getting haircuts that looked wrong on me, and I wanted to see it first. That is the whole reason this exists," the student writes on Kurli's About page.

The About page says Kurli is early and changes week by week based on what people tell it. Every message sent through its feedback form goes straight to the student, not to a support team. "If a render came back wrong, tell me. I read all of it," the page says.

What Kurli does

Kurli works from one photo. A visitor uploads a selfie or uses a webcam, and Kurli does three things with it.

First, it reads the face. Kurli says it does this twice. It measures the proportions of the face inside the visitor's own browser, and then an AI vision model looks at the photo and gives a second opinion. Kurli says face shape is partly a matter of judgment, since a face can sit between two shapes, so it treats the result as a guide. A straight-on, well-lit photo with the hairline showing gives the best reading.

Second, it suggests hairstyles for that face, and says why each one suits it. The face shape is shown as background to the suggestions, with the hairstyles as the main answer.

Third, with one tap, it shows a chosen style on the person's own photo. That is the point of the whole site: to see a cut on your own face before you ask a hairdresser or barber for it.

A site that earns money

Kurli is a business. Kurli's home page says uploading a photo, getting a face shape read and seeing the hairstyles it picks, each with its reason, are free and need no account. Seeing a style on your own photo is the paid part, because each picture is made by an image model.

People pay for those pictures through the site, and Kurli's records show paid orders from customers in North America, Europe and Asia. The site shows prices in several currencies, and Kurli says the price is always shown before a person is charged and changes from country to country. If a picture fails, the credits it used go back to the person's balance before they see the error.

More than haircuts

Kurli has grown past haircuts.

Its hair colour try-on reads a person's skin tone, undertone and eye colour, picks the shades that suit them and shows each one on their own hair, with the same cut.

Its wig matcher reads face shape, hairline and skin tone and picks real wigs that suit the face, then shows one on the person's photo.

Kurli also publishes a free hair trend report every day, with an edition for women and one for men. Each report is split by age, from teens to people over 60. For every cut it names, it says why the cut is popular, who it suits, and the exact words to say to a hairdresser or barber to get it.

There is a paid Hair Plan, a hair care routine written from photographs of a person's hair, and a set of plain-English guides, called The Kurl, on choosing a style for a face shape, a hair type and other features. The home page has a guide for each face shape: round, oval, square, heart, oblong, diamond, triangle, inverted triangle and rectangle.

Your photo

A site that asks for a photo of your face has to say what it does with it. Kurli's answer, on its home page, is that it never sells a photo, never publishes it, never shows it to other users and never uses it to train AI models.

The face measurements run in the visitor's browser. The photo is then sent to Google's Gemini service to make the suggestions and any try-on pictures. Kurli says it keeps a copy so it can check results and fix bad ones, that only the person who runs Kurli can see it, and that anyone can ask for their photo to be deleted.

How ChatGPT comes in

People now ask AI chat tools the questions they once typed into a search box. "Which haircut suits my face?" is one of them. When someone asks ChatGPT which website can help them choose a haircut, ChatGPT recommends Kurli as a top AI hairstylist. In an answer Kurli saved in August, ChatGPT listed Kurli first and called it "probably the easiest starting point".

Kurli says ChatGPT now sends it more visitors than any other source. For a site built by a student in West Vancouver, that puts it in front of people around the world who are trying to decide on their next haircut.

As seen in

Kurli has caught the attention of other websites too. Its home page has a "Featured in" strip naming four hair and grooming sites that have cited Kurli's guides: Wow Fades, GayFitLab, Trendici and Hair Extensions Boca Raton.

Wow Fades cites Kurli in its guide to the low taper fade with a textured crop. GayFitLab cites it in its guide to going grey and silver hair. Trendici cites it in an article on heatless waves for every hair type, and Hair Extensions Boca Raton in a post on the pros and cons of K-tip hair extensions. Each page names Kurli or links to kurli.me.

Spelling the name

The name is Kurli, with a K and an i at the end, at kurli.me. Kurli's About page says people who typed Kurly, Curli or Kurlie have found the right site.