A luxury nail artist rakes in £90k-a-year selling bespoke press-on nails - and spends up to 40 hours painting each set. Maddox McCollough, 27, first started painting nails professionally during the 2020 lockdown.
She admits she was "terrible" when she first started - and "couldn’t even draw a straight line". But now, she paints sets commercially for brands like HBO, Burger King and Fox - some costing £6,000 a set.
Maddox, from North Carolina, US said: “You can’t even imagine how weird and wonderful some of the nail art requests get. I had one woman ask me to paint tiny versions of her Corgi in the style of the anime Naruto.
“As soon as I started doing nail art I just fell in love with it. I’d never been exposed to anything like it before.” In 2018, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Maddox moved to Berlin, Germany, and took a job at the Isla Berlin nail salon.
She had studied a range of art forms in college - including textiles, and industrial knitting - but this was the first time she had tried her hand at painting nails. As a new starter, Maddox had to learn the basics of painting nails - and it took her months of training to feel confident.
She said: “I’d never done nails before - this would’ve been three to four years ago and I was terrible when I first started. I could barely even paint a straight line - the first time I painted a smiley face on a nail it was absolute nightmare.
“My hand would be shaking all over the place. I studied art - I knew how to draw and paint, but this was painting on a flat surface with tiny tools.
“It’s way more challenging than anyone would think. You’ve got to think about cuticle prep, applying the extensions correctly - otherwise these things could distract from your art.”
The nail salon shut down in March 2020 - and Maddox was out of a job. She decided to spend her free time practicing art on sets of blank press-ons.
She said: “I had a lot of time on my hands - I just practiced the entire time. I’d watch nail art videos on TikTok thinking: ‘There’s no way I can copy that.’
“But I tried anyway because I thought it would help me improve. Eventually, I started posting my own videos to TikTok, which is when I started to draw attention from brands.”
Maddox’s early videos would gain up to 11k views at a time - and saw her practicing popular designs like Thomas the Tank Engine, Super Mario and Sailor Moon. Progressively, brands started paying her between £3k and £6k to paint promotional designs - her favourite being a Burger King set where each nail had a Whopper painted on it.
“A lot of brands look for unique, eye-catching nails,” she added. “Fox asked me to paint characters from Bob’s Burgers on a set - I’ve also done the Care Bears."
But her client requests can be much more niche. She said: “Someone wanted stained glass church windows on all 10 fingers - in a transparent polish so you can actually hold them up to the light and it’ll shine through.
“They wanted a mini Mother Mary and baby Jesus on each finger. I charged them around £1,000 for those.”
Maddox will soon be launching her own nail supply business - selling tools specifically designed for intricate nail art.
