I spend a fair amount of time on video calls — remote work, online meetings, the occasional interview. And honestly, there are days when I'd like to look just a little more put-together on camera, without it being a whole production. Nothing dramatic. Just a kinder version of a tired afternoon face.
So I went looking for something simple to do that. What I mostly found fell into two camps: tools that asked for permission to access every site I visit, or ones that quietly sent my camera feed off to a server to be processed. For something pointed at my own face, in work meetings, that didn't quite sit right with me.
So one evening, as a break from another project I'm working on, I sat down with some AI help and built the thing I'd been wishing for. To my surprise, it came together in a single night. ✨
What it is
It's a Chrome extension called Simple Makeup Filter for Google Meet. It adds natural skin smoothing and adjustable makeup to your Google Meet video, in real time.
You can keep it subtle — just even out your skin a little — or actually do makeup: lip color, blush, brows, eyeshadow, eyeliner, and a bit of contour and highlight, all on sliders so you can land on something that still looks like you on a good day. It tracks your face in real time, so everything stays in place when you move, blink, or tilt your head. You can also save your favorite looks as presets.
The part I cared about most: privacy
Here's the thing I most wanted to get right: your face never leaves your computer. 🔒
- No video or face data is ever sent anywhere — all the processing happens right inside your browser.
- The face-detection model (Google's MediaPipe) is bundled inside the extension, so it doesn't even have network permission to send anything out.
- It asks for exactly two things: permission to save your settings, and permission to run on
meet.google.com. That's it.
I built it this way because it's the version I would want to install myself.
How it works under the hood
The extension intercepts getUserMedia in Google Meet and routes the video stream through a two-stage pipeline:
Skin smoothing → WebGL shader. A bilateral-style filter in GLSL that blurs only skin-colored pixels (detected via YCbCr color space), leaving eyes, edges, and lips sharp. Brightness, warmth, and saturation adjustments happen in the same shader pass — one draw call per frame.
Makeup & retouching → Canvas 2D. Google's MediaPipe Face Mesh gives 468 facial landmarks every frame. Lip contours, brow curves, eyeliner wings — these are all drawn as Canvas 2D paths that follow those landmarks. Canvas 2D's
moveTo/lineTo/arcAPI is a natural fit for tracing organic face shapes, and much simpler than generating triangle meshes for WebGL every frame.
The processed canvas is then captured as a MediaStream and handed back to Meet. The whole thing runs at the camera's native frame rate, with no network calls.
It's a small gift, really 🎁
It's completely free. No sign-up, no account, no data collected. If you're on video calls a lot and you've quietly wanted something like this — but, like me, you didn't want to trade away your privacy for it — then it's yours:
→ Simple Makeup Filter for Google Meet (Chrome Web Store)
→ Source code on GitHub
A few honest notes
- It works on Google Meet (not on mobile).
- The before/after faces in my screenshots are AI-generated demo images, not real people.
- It's an unofficial, personal project. Google Meet is a trademark of Google LLC.
- It's brand new and made by one person, so if something looks off or you have an idea, I'd genuinely love to hear it — there's a feedback form linked inside the extension.
I'm a solo developer 🐿️ in Japan.
I mostly built this for myself, but if it makes even a few of your calls a little easier, that would make me really happy.
I might be slow to reply — but I read every comment. Thank you for your patience.
Thanks for reading. 🤍
