Privacy Policy

1. Who this is about

Vessa is an iPhone app that scans your face, scores your skin and builds a skincare routine. This policy covers the app, this website (vessa.care) and email you send us. Vessa decides how the data described here is used, and can be reached at support@vessa.care.

It is written to be read. Where a term has a legal meaning — “processing”, “controller”, “legitimate interests” — it carries that meaning under the GDPR, the UK GDPR and equivalent laws.

2. What Vessa collects

Only what the app needs to do its job, plus crash reports and basic usage statistics that tell us what breaks and which features are used. There is no advertising SDK, and nothing is used for ads.

• Account: Your email address, or the private relay address Apple gives us if you use Sign in with Apple, and your password if you create one (stored only as a secure hash). A display name if you set one or Apple shares it.
• Skin profile: Your onboarding and settings answers: skin type, sensitivity, goals, ingredients you want to avoid, allergies, age range, sex, whether you are pregnant or breastfeeding, sun exposure, experience level, routine size, budget, how you feel about retinol, prescription treatments, known skin conditions and any notes you add for your routine. The pregnancy, allergy and prescription answers exist to keep unsafe ingredients out of your routine.
• Face scans: The photo you take or pick, the scores, skin type and estimated skin age derived from it, the written summary, and an AI portrait made from your photo. Only your most recent face photo and AI portrait are kept in storage — a new scan replaces the previous image — while the scores stay so your progress chart has a history.
• Face tracking (TrueDepth camera): On iPhones with a TrueDepth camera, the face scan uses Apple's ARKit face tracking to find your face, draw the scanning guide over it and take the photo only when your face is in view. This face data (the position and 3D mesh of your face) is processed in real time on your iPhone only. It is never stored, never sent to Vessa's servers or to anyone else including the AI provider, never used to identify you, for advertising or for any other purpose, and it is discarded as soon as the scan screen closes. Only the photo you take, described under Face scans, leaves your phone.
• Product scans: Photos of products you scan and what the model read from them: name, brand, category, price and ingredients.
• Your shelf: The products you own or save to your wishlist, and the routines generated from them, including which steps you check off each day.
• Chats: Your messages to Vessa AI, its replies, and short notes it keeps about you and what you agreed — for example an allergy you mentioned, or that retinol is Tuesday and Friday.
• AI permission: Whether you allowed the app to send your data to the AI provider, which version of the explanation you saw, and when.
• Location: The city you choose for weather, with its coordinates. If you tap “Use my location”, the app asks iOS for your position once, turns it into a city name and saves that city with the coordinates of that moment. Vessa does not track your position in the background or over time.
• Notifications: The push token of each device you allow notifications on. Routine and scan reminders are scheduled on your phone itself.
• Subscription: Whether you have an active subscription, which product, whether it is a trial, and when it renews or expires. Apple handles the payment; Vessa never sees your card.
• Technical: Counts of AI requests, used for daily limits and for spotting failures. Server logs may hold an IP address briefly.
• Crash reports: When the app crashes or hits an error: what went wrong in the code, the steps and screens that led to it, your device model, iOS and app version, and your account ID. No photos, scores, answers, product names or chat messages, and no IP address is stored with them.
• Usage statistics: Which screens you open and which steps you complete — for example that an onboarding step was shown, a scan finished, a routine was generated, the paywall was opened or a message was sent — with your account ID, a random app installation ID, device model, iOS and app version. Never what the scan showed, what you answered, which products or what you wrote. Screen recording (“session replay”) is switched off in the app.
• Email: If you write to support@vessa.care (or any other vessa.care address), your email address, name as it appears in your email, the message, any attachments, and our replies.
• Website: vessa.care has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking cookies. See section 6.

3. Why Vessa is allowed to use it

• To provide the app — scanning, scoring, routine generation, chat and progress are the service you asked for. Without this data there is no product (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b), performance of a contract).
• With your consent — the camera, your photos, your location and your skin and health answers are only processed because you chose to take a scan, share your location and answer the questions, and your data only goes to the AI provider after you allow it on the AI permission screen. You can withdraw that permission at any time in Settings → AI Features, or by deleting the data or your account (Art. 6(1)(a), and Art. 9(2)(a) for health-related answers). Withdrawing does not affect what was processed before.
• To keep it working and fair — daily limits, abuse prevention, crash reports and usage statistics to fix problems and improve the app, and answering the emails you send (Art. 6(1)(f), legitimate interests). You can object at any time by emailing support@vessa.care.
• To meet obligations — tax and consumer-law records for purchases (Art. 6(1)(c)).

4. Who else touches it

Vessa is a small operation and uses established providers rather than running its own infrastructure. Each one only receives what it needs and processes it on Vessa's behalf.

• Supabase: Database, authentication, photo storage and the server functions that talk to the AI provider. Your data lives in Frankfurt, Germany (EU).
• OpenAI: The AI models that read a face scan, make your AI portrait, identify a product, write a routine and answer in chat. Only after you allow it in the app, the photo, message or relevant parts of your profile, shelf and routine are sent for that request. OpenAI does not use data sent through its API to train its models, and may keep requests for up to 30 days to detect abuse before deleting them. Processed in the United States.
• Apple: Sign in with Apple, App Store purchases and the delivery of notifications. If you tap “Use my location”, iOS (Apple) turns your coordinates into a city name.
• Expo: Passes push notifications on to Apple for delivery to your device. Processed in the United States.
• RevenueCat: Keeps track of whether your subscription is active, identified by your account ID, together with your email address and display name so a subscription can be found when you ask for help. Processed in the United States.
• Sentry: Receives crash and error reports (described above) so they can be fixed. Processed in the United States.
• PostHog: Receives the usage statistics described above, identified by your account ID only — never your name or email. Like any server, it sees the IP address a request comes from. Processed in the United States.
• Open-Meteo: Returns the weather and climate for the city you chose. The app and Vessa's servers ask it for a city name or coordinates; it never receives your name, email or account ID.
• Cloudflare: Hosts this website, delivers the emails Vessa sends you (such as sign-in and password-reset codes) and receives the email you send to vessa.care addresses.
• Email handling: Each email you send us is stored in Vessa's Supabase project and posted to our team's Slack workspace, where we read it and reply. We may use OpenAI to help summarise an email or draft our reply; a person checks every reply before it is sent.

Where a provider is outside the EU and the UK, the transfer is covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses (or the UK equivalent), or by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it.

Nobody buys this data, and it is not sold, rented, shared for advertising or used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. It is not used to train anyone's general-purpose AI models.

When you scan a product that is not in Vessa's catalog yet, the product's details (name, brand, category, price and ingredients) may later be added to the shared catalog so that other people can find it, sometimes with your photo of the product as its picture. Only the product is shown — never who scanned it — and it stays in the catalog if you delete your account. Face photos and portraits are never used this way.

5. Where it is kept and for how long

The database and the photo storage are hosted in Frankfurt, Germany (EU). Every table that holds your data is protected by row-level security, which means your rows are readable only by your signed-in account. Your photos are stored privately in your own folder and shown to you through short-lived signed links.

• Face photo and your AI portrait: the latest one only. Taking a new scan overwrites the previous image.
• Product photos, scores, routines, shelf, chats and notes: kept while your account exists, so your history and progress make sense.
• Usage statistics and crash reports: kept by PostHog and Sentry for their standard retention period, then deleted.
• Emails: kept as long as we need them to deal with your request. They are not linked to your account, so ask in your email if you would like them deleted.
• Purchase records: Apple and RevenueCat keep their own records of your purchases for as long as tax and consumer law requires, even after your Vessa account is deleted.

6. This website

vessa.care is served by Cloudflare. It sets no tracking cookies and runs no analytics or advertising scripts. Cloudflare keeps standard request logs (such as the IP address, browser and page requested) for a short time to run and protect the site. If you switch between light and dark mode, the choice is remembered in your own browser. Blog images are loaded from Vessa's Supabase storage. Links to the App Store take you to Apple, whose own privacy policy applies there.

7. What you can do about it

Delete your account from inside the app. Settings → Delete Account removes your account and, with it, your photos, scans, routines, shelf, wishlist, chats, notes, AI permission record and push tokens. If you signed in with Apple, Vessa also asks Apple to revoke the app's access to your Apple ID. It is immediate and cannot be undone. Deleting the app does not delete your account, and deleting your account does not cancel a subscription — cancel that in iOS Settings.

What deleting your account does not remove: product details (and a product photo) already added to the shared catalog, which no longer point to you; purchase records and the subscription profile kept by Apple and RevenueCat; usage statistics and crash reports until PostHog and Sentry delete them under their retention periods; emails you sent us; requests OpenAI may keep for up to 30 days; and copies in our database backups until those backups expire (within 7 days). Email support@vessa.care if you want us to ask RevenueCat, PostHog or Sentry to delete what they hold about you sooner.

You also have the right to a copy of your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to its use, to take it to another service, and to complain to your national data protection authority. If you live in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have equivalent rights to know, correct and delete your data; Vessa does not sell or share personal information for targeted advertising, and will not treat you differently for using these rights. Email support@vessa.care and you will get an answer within 30 days.

Turn off AI processing in Settings → AI Features at any time; scans, routines and chat then stop working until you allow it again. Notifications and camera, photo and location access can be turned off in iOS Settings at any time too — the related features simply stop working until you grant them again.

8. Children

Vessa is rated 12+ and is not intended for children under 13, or under the minimum age of consent where you live if that is higher. If you believe a child has created an account, email support@vessa.care and it will be deleted.

9. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects how your data is used, the app will tell you before it takes effect rather than relying on you to re-read this page, and if it changes what is sent to the AI provider, or to whom, the app asks for your permission again.

Questions about this page? Email support@vessa.care.