There are cameras on everything, man. Cameras on your nose, on earbuds, on air purifiers, and on your cat’s freaking litter box. Meanwhile, your hair (if, unlike me, you have that) has been watching the parade of camera-clad gadgets wistfully, without a single sensor to call its own. Until now…
Thanks to the founder of tech startup Computer Angel, Jenny Zhang, we have (to my knowledge, at least) the world’s first hair clip camera. Though it shares similarities with smart glasses, it also feels like a bit of an antidote to other face-worn wearables.
i invented a hairclip camera and moved from nyc to shenzhen to make it 🙂 pic.twitter.com/5nyBI6mOw9
— jenny z (@cowjuh) April 2, 2026
Zhang, who says she moved from New York to Shenzhen to make this wearable, is positioning the hair clip camera as a way to record video recreationally. Based on the example footage, it has a bit of a lo-fi feel. This is closer to a flip phone from 2003 than Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, which are capable of recording in 3K. You probably don’t want to record first-person action sports with this thing, but I personally like the aesthetic. It’s charmingly crappy.
Unlike other wearables, it’s unclear if there are further ambitions beyond recording things—there’s no productivity messaging here. In that way, the hair clip camera, despite its recording abilities, feels like more of a counter to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which come with all sorts of other stuff—a voice assistant and computer vision, for using AI to identify stuff in your environment, for example.
Zhang tells Gizmodo that for the time being, video recording is the main focus, adding that she “won’t be revealing anything else at the moment.” Take that response how you will, but it sounds like the door is open to other possibilities.
Can a hair clip camera, like smart glasses, still be used for spying on people? Definitely. Though, to be fair, it’s a lot more obviously a camera than the ones on Meta’s smart glasses, so at least there’s that. Would love to see a privacy light on the hair clip camera if it doesn’t already exist, though.
As you might imagine, the hair clip camera is already irking some people, though maybe not for the reasons you may think. Given the whole hair clip form factor, Zhang has suggested that her hair clip camera is a wearable for women, which rubbed some men the wrong way. On one hand, there’s a point to be made: yes, men can have long hair, too, and they can also express themselves in ways that are not traditionally masculine. I don’t think anyone in this equation is arguing otherwise.
On the other hand, it’s definitely going to appeal to women more than men. And if you’re bald? I don’t know, use something else? As a bald dude, I speak from a place of authority when I say, “Suck it up.”
Zhang says there are no current pricing details, nor is there a release date, but either way, the hair clip camera has seemed to resonate with people. Even Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky likes it, apparently. So, what say you? Are you ready to give your hair a low-res video upgrade? Or are you too bald like yours truly?
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