Want to feel like a spy? Stick a smart chip in your manicure

A few months ago, I was stuffing my face with Christmas cookies and catching up on the season 3 reunion episode of Netflix’s The Ultimatum. It was a typical tawdry hour of reality TV. Clout-hungry influencer wannabes dressed to the nines, nursing their bruised egos and rehashing the minutiae of why their relationships crashed out in front of a global audience. Kind of ho-hum, actually. And then, cast member Zaina Sesay roused me from my cookie-induced stupor by upgrading her beef to the 21st century.

“I have text message proof,” she said, smirking while beckoning over C-list celebrity host Nick Lachey with an outstretched thumb. “I have a chip on my nail.”

Cut to the camera zooming in on said microchip. After Lachey scanned it with his phone, a folder neatly titled “receipts” magically appeared. I switched out the cookies for popcorn. And with that, the studio audience, the whole of TikTok, and this reviewer collectively lost our minds.

Never say you can’t find inspiration for a gadget review from trashy television.

Finding the smart nail chip was easy. Mainly because Sesay helpfully posted a video explaining which chip she bought and how to set it up. The Jakcom N3 Smart Nail Chip comes in sets of five, 10, and 20 priced at about $20, $36, and $60. (The retail price is higher, but in my three months of testing they seem to be perpetually on sale.) The gist is it uses near-field communication (NFC) — the same tech that enables contactless payments — to transmit data to a phone.

The life of a tech journalist isn’t as exciting as a reality TV star’s. Sure, it involves keeping receipts, but there’s no scenario where I’m going to raise my chip-embedded thumb to the sky and bellow “THE PROOF IS IN THE POLISH!”

So what could I, a normal person, actually do with a smart nail chip?

For that, let’s back up real quick. What is an NFC nail chip? It’s a tiny square that slips under or on top of your nail and allows you to tap your phone to do things. I’ve used it to send texts discreetly during meetings. While suffering on the NJ transit bus, I used it to order ahead an iced coffee at the Starbucks in the Port Authority South Wing. I may occasionally use it to play the John Cena theme song when I win an argument with my spouse (and to entertain the cats). But for any of this to work, you have to be able to scan the chip quickly, reliably, and without wondering if the chip popped off your nail.

Jakcom’s default settings let you set up links to social media profiles and contact information, e-commerce shopfronts and payment platforms like eBay, Venmo, PayPal, Amazon, CashApp, and others more popular in Asia like Shopee, Alibaba, and Alipay. There’s also a brief set of “functions” like writing “finger memos” (it’s a browser-based notepad), a daily AI-generated horoscope, and a menstrual cycle calculator. Theoretically, you can use it as a wireless storage device for up to 128GB of data right on the chip, like a thumb drive, but I never got this feature to work.

But before I could even figure out the best way to use this chip, I had another problem to solve. Nail polish chips and press-on nails notoriously pop off. How do I attach this thing to my nail and get it to really stick?

Scanning an NFC nail chip isn’t quite as seamless as paying for the subway or items at the store. I quickly learned most people have no clue where their phone’s NFC antenna is. (At first, I didn’t either.) Most iPhone owners, for example, seemed to think it was located near the camera bump. It isn’t — it’s right along the top edge of the phone. On Android, it can vary anywhere from the mid-back to the upper top of the phone. This usually meant people would tap their phone to my nail and we’d both stand there staring, waiting for something to happen. Most times, this ended with a friend or coworker arching their brow, asking why I’d bother doing this when I could just text them the information.

After three months of testing, I can now get the chip to scan 95 percent of the time. Learning that required a lot of money, glue, and a zealous commitment to the bit that left me questioning my judgment. As with any manicure, it all boils down to appropriate prep and application.

Each chip is a flexible 5mm square that’s 0.12 mm thick, including the adhesive backing. That’s about the size of an eraser on an old school No. 2 pencil, and about as thin as a strand of hair. Somehow, this is still sometimes too big and thick to easily apply.

Jakcom’s instructions present two options for application:

I tried the former. Maybe my natural nail is unnaturally curvy, but I couldn’t get the chip to lay flat. The edges would always lift. To flatten and cover the chip, I needed generous globs of polish. All I had to show for my efforts was a messy, lumpy nail. Hardly chic. Using brush-on glue and a clear top coat worked better, but it’s not exactly discreet.

After my failures, I opted to try the chip with press-ons. You can see my first attempt in these photos, and I’m pleased to say it worked. Despite flouting the instructions about conservative glue use, my coworkers and I successfully scanned the chip. You get an NFC notice on your phone like you would with any other tag with instructions to open a link or automatically run an Apple Shortcuts app.

In one example, I set up the “finger memo” feature, a browser-based notepad you can write anything in, that I jokingly wrote “Please save my chickens” on (I don’t have chickens.) It did, however, scan slowly. Unfortunately, this method isn’t durable or long-lasting. Even though it’s only 0.12mm thin, placing the chip under the press-on creates enough space for water to seep in and weaken the glue. It flew off the next day after a shower. I re-glued the nail. That worked until I hopped into a hot tub two days later.

The nail was lost. The chip was wrecked.

Thus began weeks of trial and error. After dozens of TikTok press-on application tutorials, $50-worth of nail sets, and so much glue, I can now tell you the best placement is the underside edge of a medium-to-long length press-on. (See the photo above.) That allows your nail to stay put and the chip to be easily scanned. If you use several thin layers of brush-on nail glue, you can “seal” the chip to resist showers, baths, and washing the dishes. I do, however, recommend resealing every few days.

If you were limited to Jakcom’s default programming, I’d say this really wasn’t worth the effort. But, you can also use the chip as a regular NFC tag. I’ve got an iPhone, so I used the Apple Shortcuts app to reprogram the chip to something more useful. (I didn’t get to test this on Android, but you might be able to use apps like NFC Tools or Tasker to do something similar.)

For instance, I can now program the nail chip to send my spouse an ETA when I leave the office. When I’m leaving, I scan my thumb, it opens my texts with my spouse, and starts Apple’s Check In timer feature. All I have to do is hit send. Alternatively, I could use the default Shortcuts automation to scan the chip and send an “I’m running late!” notification to my scheduled calendar events. I could also use it to input a Starbucks order or open Shazam. The only limit is your creativity and programming prowess.

Once the Shortcuts app opened up more possibilities, I felt like James Bond, especially on days when I’d wear my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. I’d walk in crowded places and no one looking at me would even know my glasses could record them and my manicure hid a tiny chip programmed to start recording conversations when tapped. I never actually used the latter function outside of testing. It’s clunky compared to a hidden microphone or recorder. But the point is I could do it if I wanted, and that was both cool and unsettling.

If I were a more dramatic person, I could see myself using this chip in real petty, dystopian ways. Thankfully, I’m an Aries with limited patience for real-life drama.

This chip only makes sense if you have a use case where discretion or convenience is key, the skill to program it effectively, the patience to test it, and then the confidence to know it will work when needed. The more complicated the task, the more ways you have for this to fail. Some ideas I tried either didn’t work because Shortcuts can be finicky, or mid-way through experimenting, I realized it’s faster to use my phone.

That’s the crux of the problem. It’s a theatrical, eye-catching gizmo. I felt cool, and a little bit mysterious, wearing one. But for ordinary people living ordinary lives, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for little payoff. Maybe you’ll see me at CES next year using this in lieu of a business card. Most likely, I’ll leave the dramatic flair to reality TV.