Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Amazing 'Purikura' Machines

Purikura, short for Purinto Kurabu (Print Club), are Japanese photo booths that let you take digital pictures with your friends and then decorate and edit them using a touch screen and stylus. After you finish decorating, your pictures are then printed on multiple copies of sticker paper so you can cut them and distribute them among your friends. You can also have them sent to your cell phone or e-mail address.

Purikura booths can be found at shopping areas and arcades around Japan and are incredibly popular with teenage girls and young women, who use the image editing features to wash out the natural colors of the photos so their skin look smoother and lighter. Over the past few years, many booths have even introduced a function that lets you enlarge your eyes so you can look "cute" like an "anime character" or "freaky" like an "alien", depending on who you ask.


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