BeautyPlus

Is BeautyPlus safe?

BeautyPlus carries little risk from strangers, but it asks for a lot of trust with your face and photos. Pixocial, the Singapore company that runs it, is controlled by China's Meitu, and the app's privacy policy reads almost line for line like Meitu's. Data may be stored in mainland China. The US section lets the company use facial recognition on your photos for "internal research purposes". Uploads come with a perpetual licence. India also blocked the app in 2020 over data concerns. We score it 48/100, below Meitu (50) and Facetune (58).

Who runs BeautyPlus

BeautyPlus began as the overseas version of Meitu's selfie camera. Its publisher, Pixocial Technology (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., was set up in 2015 as Meitu Technology (Singapore) and also runs AirBrush. In late 2023 Meitu brought in outside investors, including Fidelity's Eight Roads. Its 1 December 2023 announcement to the Hong Kong exchange put Meitu's stake in Pixocial at 80.62% on a fully diluted basis, with Pixocial still a subsidiary. Meitu's chief executive became Pixocial's chairman.

That matters because the two companies share more than shareholders. Pixocial's policy lists affiliates in Xiamen, Beijing and Shenzhen, and its European notice names Tencent in China as a processor, relying on standard contractual clauses because China has no EU adequacy decision. The general clause says data may be stored in Singapore, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea or the US.

What the policy allows that the label does not

Apple's privacy label for BeautyPlus is one of the lightest in this category. It lists advertising data as used to track you, and location, device ID, usage and diagnostics as collected but not linked to you. Google Play's form is lighter still. It lists only crash logs as collected and device IDs as shared for advertising.

The privacy policy, last modified on 22 November 2024, describes far more. It lists device identifiers including IMEI, Android ID, advertising IDs and MAC address, plus the list of apps installed on your phone, for analytics and ads. It names ad networks such as AppLovin, Mintegral and Vungle. It says the app may collect "facial feature information (including but not limited to facial images)" and use face recognition. Under our rule we score the broader disclosure, so privacy sits at 38, level with Meitu.

The face-data text contradicts itself. One section says facial mapping is discarded when the app closes and never uploaded. The section for US users says you agree that Pixocial "may use facial recognition technology to collect biometric information" to verify your identity, improve the service and for internal research, and that Illinois users' biometric data is deleted within three years of their last use. We read the broader clause as the one that counts. The same policy's California table names Figma, apparently copied from another company's document. It is a small slip, but it does not suggest a careful review.

Security record

We found no breach of BeautyPlus user data. In January 2025 the US National Vulnerability Database published CVE-2024-56969. The flaw affected iOS version 7.8.010 and let an attacker obtain sensitive user information through a crafted link, rated 6.5 out of 10. The policy promises only that "some" services use encryption such as SSL, and Pixocial publishes no bug bounty or security audit that we could find.

The India block

On 29 June 2020 India's IT ministry used Section 69A of its IT Act to block 59 apps. It cited reports of apps "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data" to servers outside India. The official appendix lists "Beutry Plus" alongside Meitu, YouCam Makeup and TikTok. The order named no specific finding against each app, but under our rules a national block whose stated reason is the app's data handling counts as an order. That is why regulatory record sits at 60 rather than in the high 80s.

Kids, subscriptions and the content licence

The terms, last modified on 27 March 2024, bar users under 13 (16 in some countries) and require a guardian's permission up to 18. The privacy policy instead says Pixocial does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. The App Store rates the app 13+ and says it contains user-generated content and infrequent suggestive themes. Its slimming, reshaping and AI avatar tools raise the same body-image concerns as other beauty editors.

Anything you make available through the app comes with a non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable licence that Pixocial can sublicense. Premium subscriptions renew automatically, and the terms say payments are non-refundable where the law allows. The AI features include ChatGPT, so some prompts go to OpenAI's service.

How to use BeautyPlus more safely

1. Allow access to selected photos only, never your full library.
2. Deny the tracking request on an iPhone, and reset the advertising ID on Android.
3. Email [email protected] with "BeautyPlus" in the title to opt out of interest-based ads.
4. Keep photos of children and other people out of the AI tools.
5. Cancel subscriptions through Apple or Google at least 24 hours before renewal.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (70) is BeautyPlus's strongest factor, since strangers rarely reach you through an editor. Privacy (38) is the weakest, because of transfers to China, research use of face data in the US section and device tracking that the store labels leave out. Security (47) reflects a 2025 vulnerability and vague encryption promises. Regulatory record (60) reflects India's 2020 block. For a Taiwanese rival, see YouCam Makeup.