Like so many other nail salons attempting to navigate the fussily crafted mandates governing their industry through the pandemic, Fremont’s Pamper Nail Gallery shut down in 2020, early into the shutdown. Unlike most of those businesses, however, it turned out to be a blessing for owner Vivian Sue Rahey.
Instead of making her exquisitely crafted nail art for a roomful of salon customers, she instead took her hand-painted nail art to the global market of e-commerce. TikTok and Instagram videos nudged her business into the next stratosphere and, voila, a sensation was born.
“It’s very interesting what nails have become,” said Rahey, from inside her office in a Fremont industrial park. “It’s something of a cult following.”
If nail art is a cult, then Rahey is its de facto cult leader, gaining fame for painting tiny images of movie characters, horror movie scenes and anything else someone can think up onto the face of a plastic nail – all the while assembling a dedicated crew of designers who are helping to push the burgeoning art form forward.
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Rahey, who previously worked as a software engineer in Southern California, has even turned to her engineer roots to create nail applications that morph and move with body and environmental temperatures.
“This is what I’m obsessed with, creating as many animation or sort of hidden effects, which has become really popular," she said.
In addition to designing custom nail sets, Rahey’s company, Pamper Nail Gallery, is regularly hired by movie studios to create nails for red carpet premiers, including Marvel’s Thor 11 and Dungeons and Dragons. Progressive Auto Insurance hired her to make a set of nails with its iconic Flo character. Rahey appreciates a challenge — there’s virtually no image she can’t fit onto a nail.
“It’s such an interesting canvas," Rahey said. "It’s not like a sheet of paper or just kind of a rectangular board. It’s 10 little pieces of plastic essentially and what you’re doing is you’re telling a story.”
In the story of Rahey’s early life, there’s nothing that even hinted of the life path she would undertake. She never studied art — an aunt’s harsh review of one of her childhood paintings dashed any enthusiasm she might’ve had for the form.
Rahey was born in Shanghai, China, moving with her family to the U.S. when she was 6 years old. It was a hard transition.
“When I was just a little kid, barely spoke English very well," she recalled. "I was crying every day at home because it was pretty rough on me. All I could feel back then was pure shame about who I was and my culture.”
When she entered into the stressful career world of software engineering, she would often retreat to the bathroom, pulling out multiple bottles of nail polish to trick out her nails. It became her regular escape.
By 2017, she’d given in to a creative calling, opening her Fremont nail salon, which emphasized artistic applications for nails. Sometimes the nail painting sessions would stretch as long as 11 hours.
Rahey hired others designers without any artistic experience, giving them an opportunity to blossom from within the craft as she had. Jasmine Sap began as a front desk receptionist in the salon, working her way up to becoming a lead designer in the company.
“I’ve actually hired a lot of girls here who started with no nail art experience either,” said Sap, sitting at her desk surrounded by bottles of nail polish. “To see them grow into these amazing and capable artists really has been amazing.”
For Rahey, something odd happened as she dove headlong into her new career: the deeper she fell into her art, interpreting images from Japanese anime and Chinese culture, the more she began to appreciate her own Chinese heritage from which she’d once strayed.
“It really allowed me to fully kind of come full-circle with appreciating some of the cultural aspects that I was ashamed by when I was little,” Rahey said. “And most of that I think is spoken through art.”
Rahey’s company has expanded with the exploding popularity of nail art, opening two offices in the Bay Area and another in Las Vegas. Inside her Fremont warehouse, designers sit at desks decorated with stuffed animals and Hello Kitty. One designer showed off her unique creations, a series of nails that came together to form a five-finger octopus, a larger-than-life dragonfly that sat on a nail appliqué, and a set of rattlesnake tail nails that actually rattled when shook.
For Rahey, a look back on her own life trajectory revealed a journey where one unexpected event seemed to guide her to the next, landing at this place at the fingertip of the nail art world.
“I just pursued, I guess, like happiness or that emotion that art evoked for me,” Rahey said. “And then it turned into something I didn’t expect.”
