Asian-American artist, nail tech gaining sense of community through social media
CHICAGO (CBS)-- CBS 2's Jamaica Ponder found Nails by Ameya through TikTok, like most of Ameya's customers.
Ameya Okamoto's account wasn't created originally centering on nails, and still, it doesn't entirely.
"I posted like a couple of videos the day that I was bleaching my hair and they all went viral and I was like, 'Okay, so this is easy,'" Okamoto said.
She's a multi-disciplinary artist, working across mediums– nails being just one of them– but the 23-year-old initially got into TikTok because it provided her with a much-needed sense of community
"There are a lot of times in my life where I needed somebody, I didn't have a lot of support through a lot of really hard personal experiences. And honestly, social media is there," Okamoto said.
Now, as she begins to build her small business, Nails by Ameya, that online community is translating into real-life customers.
"This was the first time I was really doing it through TikTok, but like what made me go ahead and do it was more so that like Ameya just felt, like a very authentic person and it was just cool to be like, wow, this is just a real person who also does amazing work," customer Simedar Jackson said.
Okamoto first started doing press-on nails out of her dorm room at the School of the Art Institute.
"I basically ran a tiny nail shop out of my dorm room at SAIC for about all of last year, until I saved up enough money to go to nail school, like all cash," Okamoto said.
Now, she works from Bedazzled in River North and occasionally from her home studio.
Working much like a tattoo artist, Okamoto uses her iPad to collaborate with her clients, drawing up the design based on a Moodboard she'll have them submit beforehand.
"It's very much a skill to be able to hear somebody kind of give you bits and pieces of things that are happening in their brain and then be able to bring that into the physical world," Jackson said. "In a way that's like a cohesive picture and project and you're like, 'Wow! That is literally what I was thinking, but you weren't able to put it together in your head.'"
"I have my own personal reasons for why I became a nail tech, which is not actually really based in the art and the visual culture of it," Okamoto said.
She says being a nail tech is a way for her to interrogate her own identity.
"I identify not as a nail tech, but like an Asian-American, Gen Z, nail tech, somebody who really interested about what it means to be a nail tech community, which I think is like a new step in like service work in general, but also in our culture," Okamoto said.
She wants to challenge the idea that something as seemingly surface-level as nails, can open doors to new conversations around race and class.
"The nail salon kind of became a really interesting research focus for me because it's a place where historically, Black and Asian communities have really come together, right?" Okamoto said. "We can't ignore the fact that nails and really fun nails, like the Nail Queens of Long Island. That's all like Black and Latino culture. But like, we're the nail techs, right?"
