ModiFace’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Houghton has been appointed the new Chief Executive Officer of the Toronto-based Augmented Reality (AR) beauty leader, acquired by L’Oréal in 2018. He will begin his new role on 1 October 2022.
Jeff Houghton will succeed Parham Aarabi, founder and current CEO of ModiFace, who has expressed his desire to focus on a personal area of research interest and will be stepping down from his current role.
Under Aarabi’s leadership, ModiFace has developed proprietary technologies for facial features video tracking, applied in Virtual Try-On (VTO) for make-up and hair coloration, as well as skin diagnosis, resulting in over 30 patents and more than 200 scientific publications over the past few years.
Jeff Houghton has been ModiFace’s Chief Operating Officer since 2019. He joined ModiFace in 2016, developing new augmented reality effects and collaborating on innovations such as new face trackers and virtual try on solutions. After ModiFace was acquired by L’Oréal in 2018, Houghton began to oversee the ModiFace roadmap and in his current role has been managing the day-to-day operations of the company in various functions. In addition to his strong tech skills in computer vision, AI and applications development, Houghton is recognized as being a pragmatic problem solver, innovative and people-centric.
A three-month transition will take place until 1 January 2023. Following that date, ModiFace and L’Oréal will have Parham Aarabi’s continued support as an external consultant focusing on innovation, R&D and tech talents attractiveness topics.
