• by Shannon Grotzinger , November 3, 2008

Take it from one who knows. Storming out of a salon in tears mid-haircut is not a pleasant situation. Whether you're looking to spare yourself the agony of a full-on salon failure or just want to see how insanely hot you'd look with long, flowing blond locks, new virtual makeover site taaz.com allows you to give your looks a complete overhaul. After uploading your photo, you can try on different hairstyles, pop in colored contacts, groom your eyebrows, and test every color of lipstick, blush, and eye shadow that can possibly be reproduced on your monitor (that's millions, for those of you who spend more time making salon appointments than adjusting your monitor's settings). The application lets users adjust each facet of a hairstyle, from adding more volume to lengthening the bangs. This isn't a simple cut-and-paste job.

A step up from other makeover sites that only allow you to play with the cut and color of your hairstyle, Taaz goes one - nay, many - steps further and lets users play around with their faces. By positioning dots at the corners of your mouth, cheekbones, eyes and other designated spots, you can play with color and still guarantee that your lipstick doesn't end up all over your pearly whites (which you've already brightened, virtually).

The site's creator, David Kriegman, a professor of computer science and engineering at University of California, San Diego, launched the site in March after six months of development. "Within the first three months, taaz.com exceeded 1 million users," Kriegman says. "Now, we're seeing continuous growth." Viral marketing and word-of-mouth have ramped up visits to 1 million a month; the site is now a card-carrying member of the Glam Media network. "The key attributes are that it's fun and free," Kriegman says. And the fact that it doesn't leave you with an orange halo of fuzz and frizz that takes a year to grow out doesn't hurt, either.