Tuesday, April 05, 2016
The Nailbot: It'll Paint Your Nails and Teach You Tech
The Creators Project: The world of nail art is a vast and vibrant scene, from the bold structural designs of Alicia Torello, to the pop-inspired styles of London’s WAH Nails, to the cheerful abstractions of Japan’s Nail Salon Ava Rice, there’s big business and high art in cuticle creativity. Now, with the creation of the automated, smartphone-powered, mini nail printer Nailbot, technology’s entering the fray in a big way.
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I think an important factor to consider when examining this advancement is scale. It is easy to be wowed by larger-scale technology, expected even. But the detail of which this device is capable, combined with the compactness and the convenience, are astounding, and all this amazement comes from something that can be used on a table top and stored in a cabinet. It is a reminder of how impossible a lot of our more everyday technological devices seemed just a decade ago. Once upon a time, a single computer took up an entire room. Now everyone and their brother can carry a tiny computer, game-board, address book, and camera in their back pocket.That is actually ridiculous, but nobody bothers to think about it that way because it isn't big or in our faces or yelling "TECHNOLOGY" at us. Right now, a nail painting robot box is new and magical, but ten years from now it could be something we do with strictly our phones - you wouldn't need the box part anymore, all you'd need is the app. Technology like this is making all those crazy, romanticized, Jane Jetson's beauty routine dreams a reality, and that is kind of amazing. Small advancements can mean big things, and I think that really puts technological development into perspective.
So here’s the thing, my nails have always been short, unpainted, and usually dirty. Keeping my nails short was something I picked up from years of playing a stringed instrument. And I like working with my hands, so they’ve never been particularly well kept. I grew up with an older sister who had beautiful nails. She would paint my nails too, so I never learned how to even do a solid color properly. I’ve always been a little envious towards the immaculate tiny pieces of art that some people create on their nails and then you see all over Pinterest or Instagram. This piece of technology would give people like me who don’t have the time or skill to create nail art a chance to get a piece of the action. But what I think is even more interesting about this tech is the inventor’s decision to make it controlled by iPhone. It’s amazing to see how smartphones have become such a commonplace necessity in our everyday lives. The fact that a start-up is comfortable marketing itself only to iPhone users shows how owning a smartphone has become just a given in our society, a baseline of modern convenience.
For me, despite the cool technology, it is pretty evident that she didn't come from a beauty background. Though the technology is cool, and the product may or may not take off, there is something very tacky about having a grainy .jpeg on your nails. I understand that nail art is an expensive thing, but it's also an art. Maybe if the machine would just paint your nails for you, which is not explained how it does that in the article, I would be interested. Plug in and color you want from your nail polish collection and have a robot paint your nails perfectly. That sounds grand. But, the inclusion of only light colored polishes with an image of whatever you want is cool, but very strange to me. "How was your vacation Tammy?"
"Oh let me show you some of the vacation photos, they're right on my nails", feels like a scene from a sci-fi farce. What I'm trying to say is that, sometimes though technology is really cool, and helpful, it's also sometimes dumb, and takes the art away from things. I liked what they said about maybe doing promotions from real nail art artists, who would maybe put some designs on the app. That would bring some artistry and some actual nice design into this.
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