Hot Spot: Sephora's New High-Tech Workshop

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Leave it to the city of San Francisco to get the most high-tech beauty experiences before the rest of us do: The 8,500 square feet store located at 33 Powell Street is re-opening November 20 as the first and only Sephora Beauty Tip (Teaching, Inspiration, and Play) Workshop, with over 13,000 products and interactive services. Like most beauty junkies, we’d happily spend a few hours slowly meandering through the selections at Sephora — maybe getting a touchup along the way — but this takes the beauty emporium straight into Willa Wonka territory. In addition to stations for trying new hair and makeup trends, here are the main features you should check out the next time you’re in San Francisco:

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The Beauty Workshop station at San Francisco’s Sephora Powell Street. (Photo: Courtesy of Sephora)

The Beauty Workshop: The main feature of the re-designed store will be The Beauty Workshop, a central workstation where you can take group beauty lessons with Sephora’s top makeup artist instructors, follow tutorials at the iPad stations, or find more inspiration at The Beauty Board, a shoppable gallery made of user-generated content. (And yes, there are classes before and after normal work hours!) Every single station has its own product, iPad, USB port, and Wi-Fi — which is exactly how we imagine Cher Horowitz’s beauty vanity table would look like if she were still a Beverly Hills teenager in 2015.

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The Beauty Studio at San Francisco’s Sephora Powell Street. (Photo: Courtesy of Sephora)

The Beauty Studio: This is a Sephora mainstay that you can find around the world, but the Powell Street store updated with larger stations, the life-changing Sephora + Pantone Color IQ touchscreens (trust us, this is good technology for foundation wearers), and trained Senior Artists.

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The Skincare Studio at San Francisco’s Sephora Powell Street. (Photo: Courtesy of Sephora)

The Skincare Studio: It’s about time that you can get facials at Sephora, too! Here, you can get mini facials at one of four stations, in addition to using the Skincare IQ diagnostic technology to help you pick out what skincare products to take home.

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The Fragrance IQ station at San Francisco’s Sephora Powell Street. (Photo: Courtesy of Sephora)

Fragrance IQ: What’s your signature scent? Yeah, we don’t know either — but Sephora’s first-to-market sensory technology, InstaScent, might be able to help answer this age-old question. Once you take an assessment test, scented air from the selected scent categories (out of 18) is emitted from a nozzle so that you can identify what your fragrance preferences are. No more overwhelming department store counters for you!

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The Color IQ station at San Francisco’s Sephora Powell Street. (Photo: Courtesy of Sephora)

As children, Mom and Dad told us not to run around and touch everything in the store — but they obviously weren’t taking us to Sephora.

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