Photo Booth Horrors: When Japanese Purikura Goes Wrong

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.

These are powerful tools and, as you can imagine, can conjure horrifying results if abused. We’ve searched the Japanese internets to assemble a gallery of some of the more disturbing (and hilarious) photos that have emerged from purikura photo slots.

Check it out below, if you dare.

First, let’s take a look at what purikura photo booths are capable of. Here’s one of the more dramatic transformations we came across:

▼ Before

▼ After

And here’s an example you may be more familiar with:

▼ Mona Lisa vs. ☆Mona-chan☆

Now that you have a better idea of the alchemy at work here, it’s time to delve deeper into dark world of purikura. Here’s an uncensored version of the top image: