Samsung Galaxy / Photography / FILTER - BLONDE
REVIEW
Filter - Blonde turns a one-tap hair swap into a whole app.
A single-purpose selfie novelty from the Candy Camera family that does the one thing it advertises and asks you to forgive everything else.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Filter - Blonde
STUDIO SJ
OUR SCORE
6.0
SAMSUNG GALAXY
★ 5.0
PRICE
Paid
Filter apps that do exactly one thing are a genre of their own on the Galaxy Store, and Filter - Blonde is a clean specimen of the format. There is no pretence of breadth here — the app exists to make your hair blonde in a selfie and then get out of the way. STUDIO SJ has been shipping variations on this template for years under the Candy Camera umbrella, and this is the hair-colour SKU of that catalogue.
That tight focus is the appeal. A general-purpose camera with twenty filters buried in a carousel asks you to learn its menus before you can play with the one effect you actually wanted. Filter - Blonde skips the negotiation and just gives you the toy. Open it, swap your hair, share the result, close it.
What you give up in exchange is everything else. There is no editing room of any depth, no skin retouching that matters, no presets to save, no comparison to your competitors’ hair-colour brushes inside more serious photo apps. It is a feature pretending to be an app, and on a phone you already own that is sometimes enough.
It is a feature pretending to be an app, and on a phone you already own that is sometimes enough.
FEATURES
Filter - Blonde is exactly what the name promises: a selfie filter app whose entire premise is recolouring your hair blonde. Open the camera, point it at yourself, watch the on-device model guess where your hair is, and pick from a small spread of blonde tones — platinum, ash, honey, strawberry, the usual hairdresser shortlist. Snap, save, share.
The app sits inside the wider Candy Camera family of single-purpose photo toys from STUDIO SJ, which is why the UI feels familiar if you have ever installed one of its siblings. Camera preview at the top, filter strip across the bottom, a shutter button, a gallery import for filtering existing photos rather than live shots. There are sticker overlays, brightness and contrast sliders, and the standard share sheet out to gallery and social.
Monetisation is the Galaxy Store norm for free novelty cameras — banner ads under the preview, the occasional interstitial between captures, a rewarded-ad route to unlock a few extra tones or sticker packs.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The hair-detection model is the part that has to work, and on a clean headshot against a plain background it does. The blonde shades read as blonde rather than yellow paint, the edges feather instead of bleeding, and the result is recognisably a photo of you rather than a wig stuck on top. For a free filter app from a studio that publishes dozens of these, that is a real ceiling.
It also commits to its one job. There is no pretence that this is a full camera replacement or a portrait studio — it is a filter, it lives next to your other filters, and the export goes to your gallery cleanly so you can use the result anywhere.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The detection falls apart the moment the lighting is anything other than flattering. Fringes, baby hairs, anything backlit, anything in a ponytail — the mask gets confused and the colour spills onto skin, ears, or background. Faces with shorter or darker hair fare worst, which is a real limitation given who installs this kind of app.
Ad density is the other ceiling. Interstitials land between actions you take more than once a minute, which on a novelty app you opened for fun reads as friction rather than commerce. There is no clean paid upgrade either — the rewarded-ad pattern keeps you watching short videos to unlock the parts of the app that should arguably ship in the free tier.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you want to see what you look like blonde for an afternoon, then delete it before the second day of ads. For anyone who edits photos seriously, a proper portrait app with a hair-colour brush will do the job with more control and fewer interruptions. As a Galaxy Store novelty, Filter - Blonde is competent at the one trick it sells.