Hasta La Gadget!

Ever fancied a beauty gadget decorated in jewels, precious stones and encrusted initials? Yes, it’s a bling face roller!

The ReFa Pro, which retails for just under 25,000 yen (about $300), is an electric roller for massaging your face and body, aimed primarily at women users. Now its maker Dinos is celebrating the company’s fortieth anniversary by holding a personalized and bejeweled rollers.

The first stage of the contest was themed “cute” and has already ended. The second (”cool”) just kicked off and the winner has the chance to win 400,000 yen (nearly $5,000), with runners-up receiving luxury beauty care treatments.

To enter consumers just send in pictures of how they’ve customized and decorated their ReFa roller. As the competition site gives tips, you can add dozens of “jewels” (real or not) and flourishes like emblems, your initials and more!

Making jewelry and other crafts are popular past-times for female consumers in Japan and we like how this campaign utilizes that hobby culture to push interest in the product, and also design innovations created not by the manufacturer’s team but the consumers themselves.

Face roller massagers are massive in Japan, as any trip to a beauty gadgets section of an electronics store will soon reveal. Many are pretty basic — just a couple of arms and roller heads, looking like a small plastic dowsing rod — but others are more hi-tech, like the solar-powered ReFa Pro. The idea, in a nutshell, is that they slim your face, firm up your skin and make you look more youthful.

They really started to hit the bestseller lists when the makers came up with the idea of packaging them as box sets with “technique” manuals, and then sold in book shops and convenience stores. A recent example is the gold-colored Y-Shaped Roller, which came out in late February.