Now You Can Even Try on Nail Polish in AR Before You Buy via This App for iOS & Android

Augmented Reality beauty tools have become quite popular lately, and while CoverGirl's didn't exactly turn heads, the new Wanna Nails app by Wannaby looks like a great tool for anyone who uses nail polish.

Wanna Nails (available on both iOS and Android) lets you try on nail polishes before you buy them by superimposing the colors onto your own nails. It features brands like ORLY, CND Vinylux, and essie — so you're trying on real nail polishes here, not abstract colors.

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The app does a great job of recognizing nails and then accurately slapping the colors on in the right place, a process that's aided by a hand outline guide placed by the app in whatever environment you use in. Once you've found the color that suits you, there's a handy button that takes you to Amazon, allowing you to easily buy the product online. (Note: The company earns an affiliate fee for every purchase made via Amazon.)

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Wanna Nails is driven by "classic computer vision approaches and modern deep CNNs [convolutional neural network ]," said Arseny Kravchenko, the head of R&D at Wannaby, in response to a user on Product Hunt asking about the app's underpinnings. "Models are trained locally using TF [TensorFlow] and PyTorch and run on devices using CoreML (for iOS) and TF Mobile (for Android)."

Wannaby went out of its way to make your AR nails as shareable as possible, with a handy camera icon in the top-left corner that'll take a picture of your nails, as well as the ability to share directly to Instagram by tapping the corresponding logo.

Aside from possibly fooling friends and followers into thinking you got your nails done, Wanna Nails might pick up a few extra downloads because of how easy it is to send your new look to everyone.

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Cover image by Brian Lang/ Next Reality News, Screenshots by Dallas Thomas/ Next Reality News