Mastercard hid its tap-to-pay chip inside Carnival makeup stones

Brazil's Carnival is the country's biggest cultural event — days of nonstop costume, glitter, and body makeup, and almost no practical place to carry a smartphone or credit card. The absence of pockets is not cosmetic: by Serasa's data (cited in the campaign brief as '3 em cada 10 brasileiros'), three in ten Brazilians lose or have stolen the things they carry during the festivities, and cards and phones make up 64% of the cases of theft. Yet the event still handles roughly $2.5 billion in transactions in 2025 alone, so all that value flows by some payment route.

The obvious answers — a sturdier wallet, a prepaid wristband, a phone app — all fail on the same point: each is a separate object that costumed revellers do not carry and that a thief can still lift from a body. Mastercard needed a payment device that could not be separated from the wearer in a setting where nobody is holding anything.

Put the contactless chip in the cosmetic stones already glued to skin, making the payment device inseparable from the wearer and unstealable.

The chip is glued to the skin, so it cannot be lifted like a phone or card.

Paying requires no separate object, removing the friction that made carrying valuables a liability.

It rides on an existing behavior—wearing body stones—so adoption costs nothing new.

The device is inseparable from the wearer, eliminating the loss vector entirely.

To solve a problem in a no-carry setting, embed the solution in something the user already keeps on their body.

The case reports a 156% rise in daily transactions, zero thefts, and 30 million views; no independent publisher has verified these figures. It is a 2025 pilot too new to call durable, but it flags a repeatable play: any high-theft, no-pocket event can be entered by hiding the payment device in the thing the crowd already wears, provided a local issuer and dense contactless terminals exist.