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The machines are available at arcades and amusement centers in the “purikura” section and offer over 1,500 designs.

Unbeknownst to many across the pond, Sega—the Japanese gaming company that for some reason thought turning their signature character, Sonic, into a werewolf would revitalize sales of the flagship series—dabbles in much more than console and arcade games. The company also designs other “amusement” machines, including Japan’s famous “purikura” photo booths.

Said photo booths have evolved in recent years from simple origins to the point that the interiors now resemble the bridge of the USS Enterprise. So, perhaps sensing that purikura booths had kind of reached the peak of their functionality, Sega recently rolled out the new “Nail-Puri” machine. While the name clearly invokes purikura machines, Nail-Puri, rather than taking pictures of your hands—which would be kind of weird and creepy—allows you to design your very own nail art, which the machine will print onto special stickers for an instant nail makeover.

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In the interest of full disclosure, by the way, I’m probably the least qualified person on the RocketNews24 staff to be talking about this, considering I’m a man who has never painted or decorated my nails in any way (not that there’s anything wrong with a man painting his nails) and, also, I bite my fingernails incessantly so there wouldn’t even be much real estate to decorate anyway. I guess I could apply them to stop me biting them?

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Anyway, the Nail-Puri machine, similarly to purikura, sees guests enter a private booth with a giant touchscreen panel and lets them get to work combining and manipulating the various base designs on offer. There are, according to Sega, over 1,500 different options to choose from – which should mean literally millions of possibilities. After you decide on your own unique design, the booth prints, we presume, 10 fingers’ worth of nail stickers on thin sheets of high quality sticker paper that Sega apparently designed specifically for Nail-Puri.

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What’s more, you can even download a free Nail-Puri smartphone app that lets you create and manage your own designs ahead of time, so you can print them instantly at a Nail-Puri machine without holding up the line or whatever. You can even upload images, letting you add photos and artwork to your nail designs.

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With all this newfangled technology and all, you’d think a Nail-Puri sticker set would run on the expensive side, but in fact, a set of stickers will only set you back about 400 yen (US$3.50) with the option of additional prints for just 300 yen more.

You can look for a Nail-Puri machine near you at game arcades or amusement centers around Tokyo (you can search in Japanese here), or you can just noodle around with the free design app here.

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Source: IT Media
Screenshots: Sega/YouTube