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Student Embedded Subway Chip in Her Acrylic Nails, Swipes in Without Card

The subway (or “tube”) is a great way to get around a busy city, but having to carry around, eventually lose, and replace your pass card sucks. These are facts. Sure, you can put the card in a special wallet or purse pouch for ease of retrieval, but nothing even comes close to the creation of this clever student.

A photo posted by Lucie Davis (@luciedavis) on

Lucie Davis is a jewelry design student at Central Saint Martins in the UK. In the photo above, you can see that the tube gates are letting her through with just a swipe of her hand. That’s because she took out the RFID chip in her “Oyster Card,” inserted it into the to-be-set acrylic of some fake nails, and painted the nails the classic Oyster card color. Now she has her tube card at her fingertips whenever she needs it, literally. The video below shows the bionic nails in action:

A video posted by Lucie Davis (@luciedavis) on

As reported by Laughing Squid, Davis can still add money to the chip, so no problems there. But we have to wonder what’s worse: losing your card and finding it in your purse or under your couch, or snapping a nail unexpectedly and having the bit of acrylic vanish into the detritus of mass transit. Still, we’d feel pretty damn cool having cyborg nails for a week.

What do you think? Would you try this body hack, what other cyborging would you be down for? Let us know in the comments below.

Images: luciedavis

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