MECHANICAL MANICURES
Byline: Kavita Daswani
HONG KONG — The next time you are strolling through a shopping mall in Asia, you can stop off and get imprints of funky designs — curlicues, lightning rods, falling leaves — on your fingernails.
At least that is the vision of Frank Kuan, general manager of Atlus Entertainment Pte Ltd. in Singapore, who has just introduced the concept of fingernail imprints to Southeast Asia with the NailMore booth.
Like many offbeat ideas, NailMore originated in Japan and is being distributed by the same company that gave the world photo-sticker machines, which are essentially like any photo booth, but the images come out printed on stickers.
In its native Japan, NailMore has had an unexpected cult following: gaggles of young women line up outside the booth-like machine, where a precision ink-jet printer and sophisticated computer software are used to create patterns on their fingernails.
A touch-pen navigates through a user-friendly interface — the screen is smaller than a computer screen — where customers can choose from 80 patterns categorized under themes like “Season,” “Art,” “Pop” and “Cute,” and designs will be updated every few weeks.
Fingers are placed one at a time into a holder, and a base coat is first applied, then the desired pattern is imprinted and the technique is finished with a special protective coating. It takes a few minutes to do each nail. And if you hate the result, it flakes off within a week.
NailMore is also being introduced to prospective buyers in Thailand, Taiwan and Singapore. So far, major retailers like Seibu in Hong Kong have expressed an interest.
Atlus has since taken the concept to Hong Kong and Korea — cities that Kuan said mirror Japan’s pop culture — where now “people are slowly getting it.”
“It’s like a new nail culture that involves entertainment,” said Kuan. “We have an agent in Korea, and in Hong Kong we have appointed a few distributors to sell the idea to retailers and shopping malls.
“We are looking at places in different Asian markets where young people tend to meet up and want to have fun and enjoy themselves in an economical way,” he added. “For a few U.S. dollars each, people can get two fingernails patterned, which is cheaper and more interesting than going to a nail salon or having a basic manicure.”
He conceded that it was a particular type of consumer who would want cutesy little designs on their fingernails.
“Since it was released in Japan, it’s been a huge success,” he said. “We’re pretty confident we’ll have the same reaction in other parts of Asia.”