Celina Ryden Says Stop Nail Shaming

Nail artist Celina Ryden is known as an international educator and avid YouTuber. She recently came up with the campaign Stop the Nail Shaming, and is devoting a portion of her online store to feature merchandise with her artwork and slogan. Here, she shares the purpose behind this call to action:

The shaming culture is taking over the nail industry on every social media platform. Examples of this include: "Nail shaming groups," "What I asked for vs. what I got," "I visited the worst reviewed nail salon in my city," etc. People are getting more and more creative when it comes to bashing and shaming people's nail work, and it has started to damage the industry in the way that people lose their passion or get too afraid to post their work on social media at all.

Because of social media, we get exposed to all these amazing nail pictures all day long. Yes, these techs do exist and the nails are amazing, but it’s not a fair representation of the average nail work out there. However, clients get exposed to this and get the impression that those flawless, perfectly shaped and decorated nails are the norm and so when they schedule an hour at a nail salon that is the result they expect to get. Of course it’s not impossible to get to that level and nail techs should definitely strive to get there, but we need to start to talk about the normal nail tech and the reality behind a normal day at work where most techs have maybe an hour per client and can’t come up with intricate nail art designs on the fly. In place of shaming, we need to be spreading love, support, and encouragement. Shaming and bullying is never the right way to go because you never know what someone is going through in their lives.

We need to start talking about this shaming trend and educate nail clients more about the reality of the nail industry. We need to get people in the nail industry excited to start supporting and lifting each other up. Since this also is a industry where the majority of nail techs are women, it’s even more important that we start to spread a more positive and supporting trend.

I’ve created some T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, etc. with my own hand drawn design requested by my followers. The logo contains a hand in a ”stop” position (which is actually my own hand that I traced on my iPad Pro) together with the logo from my ”Empowerment Collection” and a text that says ”Create magic every day."

My goal is to spread more awareness about this topic and to stand up for the normal nail tech. I have so many followers who have been sending me messages for a long time talking about this and how it affects them. The shaming culture has to be stopped before it gets worse.

See her video below to learn more and follow #stopthenailshaming to participate in a more positive nail conversation.