Tikki said ACAB

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

Have you ever wondered why the rest of the Sailor Team started focusing on their nails & nailpolish during their second transformations?

Or why the Outers get closeups specifically of their lipstick gliding on?

The answer is simple:

Money, Money, Money!

The real-life toy version of the Star Power Sticks - that’s the official name of the wands the Inners transformed with in R - had removable nailpolish bottles making up the ornate tops of the wands.

Photo by SakkysSailormoonToys

And the real-life toy versions of the Lip Rods - the somewhat unoriginally named wands the Outers transformed with - had tubes of lipstick in the handle.

Photo by SakkysSailormoonToys These toys are pretty old, so in most of them, the lipstick has deteriorated or been removed - but the photo on the box shows what they would’ve looked like in their heyday.

Bandai’s toy version of her first transformation brooch opened up and came with a bottle of nail polish that could fit inside. It shared the same design that was later used for the nail polish bottles in the Inners’ Star Power Sticks.

Photo by SakkysSailormoonToys Irwin Toys/Dic’s toy version of her first brooch actually just had the inside of the Crystal Star (her second brooch) instead.

And yes - what were once marketing gimicks are now being honoured forward in the new 25th anniversary merchandise, including gachapon toys with fake nail polish, fake lipstick, and 2D bottles!

Photos by LemonShortbread

Stills from Leona’s Workshop