Meta has put Kylie Jenner in front of its latest smart-glasses pitch, releasing a YouTube ad for Starfire AI glasses made in partnership with the celebrity and beauty entrepreneur.
The ad matters because Meta is trying to make camera-equipped eyewear look ordinary, fashionable and celebrity-adjacent after years of public unease around its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Wearable cameras are not abstract hardware. They sit on a person’s face, point at other people, and make recording less obvious than holding up a phone.
In the video, Jenner is shown moving through a staged day at home, with much of the footage presented from her point of view. According to 404 Media’s Samantha Cole, the ad shows Jenner’s character being directed through a series of quiet interactions with workers and assistants: making part of a green smoothie, encountering someone cleaning a pool, meeting a skincare employee, receiving flowers said to be from her mother, and watching people move a large sculpture inside her house.
The spot also includes a scene with Jenner holding a Persian cat, followed by a shift to her taking black spray paint from a closet, getting into a black SUV and going to a billboard bearing her own image. The ad then moves away from the first-person view, showing the car from a distance before Jenner gets out and spray-paints “XO, KYLIE” on the billboard.
Meta’s ad does not, at least in the portion described by 404 Media, dwell on technical details about Starfire. The pitch is lifestyle first: famous person, expensive house, frictionless recording, brand aura. That is the oldest trick in consumer hardware advertising, and it is doing extra work here because the product category has a social-permission problem.
Meta’s glasses baggage
404 Media has previously reported on incidents involving Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including a border patrol agent recording a raid with the device and users filming and harassing massage parlor workers. Cole wrote that the glasses have also become associated with law enforcement and people who make others uncomfortable by demonstrating the recording indicator in social settings.
Meta has pushed back on that framing in past exchanges with 404 Media, according to the outlet, saying its smart glasses should not be treated as inherently creepy or as “cop-glasses.” 404 Media has also reported on Meta adding facial-recognition-related capabilities to its glasses, a particularly sensitive area for a device worn at eye level.
The Jenner campaign appears to be a reputational reset as much as a product ad. Meta is not just selling lenses, speakers and cameras. It is selling the idea that people around the wearer should accept being inside the wearer’s computing interface.
That is a harder sell than the ad admits. A celebrity house full of staff, staged errands and a billboard stunt is a controlled environment. The real test for Meta’s glasses remains much less glamorous: whether people in pools, shops, bars, workplaces and homes feel they can tell a face-mounted camera to stop recording.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
