The nail tech Sha’Carri Richardson trusts to overnight her custom press-on nails

Surprisingly, nail art has taken center stage during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Gymnast Jordan Chiles said her long acrylic nails remind her to be more careful so as to not break one, and sprinter Noah Lyles showed off his manicure during his race.

Sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson is another athlete whose nails are a big part of her game-day look, and in the spirit of the world’s fastest runner on record, the late Olympic track athlete Florence Griffith Joyner, they are very long and colorful.

When Richardson competes in the women’s 4×100 meter relay Friday, she hopes to medal and earn gold while wearing a set of custom press-on nails designed by one of her nail technicians, Angie Aguirre.

Aguirre became a viral sensation after Richardson appeared on Vogue’s July 2024 digital cover. Richardson is wearing a nail set Aguirre made and shipped overnight for the photo shoot.

Vogue flew to Central Florida, where Richardson was training for the Olympics, and Aguirre sent a set of nails for Aguirre’s cousin, who lives in Florida, to apply on Richardson’s nails for the photo shoot. The Brooklyn, New York, nail tech said Vogue shared a photo of Griffith Joyner with a special request: “Hey, can you make her nails look like this?”

So she took the inspiration and set out to create nail art using items Richardson likes. “A lot of gold,” Richardson said. “She always wears jewelry and gold medals because, why not?” Griffith Joyner wore stars on her nails in the photo, so Aguirre found gold metal stars and put them on the nails. “I wanted the nails to pop, and they did.”

“It felt amazing to see the photo shoot [when it went live] because that was back in March,” Aguirre said. “You’re like, oh my God, I can’t wait to see the shoot, I can’t wait to see the shoot, and then you forget about the shoot. There are so many things that happen in between that when it came out, I was like ‘Whoa, this is dope.’ ”

For some reason, Aguirre said, she didn’t anticipate all the love she got on social media when Vogue published the cover. “We’ve done commercials, but, you know, I guess I didn’t have time to put in perspective that it was Vogue. You know, Vogue.”

Her friend, celebrity hairstylist Nikki Nelms, had to tell Aguirre how special the moment was. “She called me like, ‘friend, you made the cover of Vogue, I don’t think I made the cover of Vogue.’ And I’m like, ‘I did, didn’t I?’ You need people to remind you of your accomplishments. Sometimes you forget to live in the moment.”

It was a chance to step back and appreciate the recognition along with all of the work and sacrifice Aguirre has made to get her business to this point. “It wasn’t just a little nail, you know, because the industry can be that way,” she said. “There is often a spotlight on hair, makeup but nail techs often feel left out and not as important. So to get to be on the cover of Vogue was f—ing dope, please excuse my language.”

Plus, Richardson wears her nails well. She’s expressive when she talks, gesticulating in a way that is similar to some of Aguirre’s clients. “Some people talk with their hands like me, and some people are very calm and mild-mannered. Thank God I don’t have any mild-mannered clients,” she said, laughing.

Aguirre acquired Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese as a client after the nail technician’s daughter saw Reese’s social media call-out for the best beauty services when she visited Atlanta. Aguirre and her daughter were driving down the highway when her daughter told her Reese needed her nails done.

“She’s like, ‘Mom, Angel Reese is going to be in Brooklyn. It’s on Instagram,’ ” Aguirre recalled. Her daughter sent Reese an Instagram message from Aguirre’s phone, then called Aguirre’s agent. “So literally from the highway to the time I got to my friend’s house, as soon as we got out the car, my agent called me back and was like, ‘you’re hired!’ ”

Aguirre said her daughter did the same thing with social media influencer Tabitha Brown, telling her to send a message directly to Brown on Instagram. She did, and Brown responded, as did actor Aisha Hinds on a separate occasion.

Until this point, Aguirre’s career has had a lot of stops and starts. She started doing nails when she was 12. She’s Panamanian and was raised in Brooklyn, where the women in her family operated a salon. Doing nails was a fun side hustle throughout college, where Aguirre graduated with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a minor in psychology. When she turned 30, Aguirre decided to go to cosmetology school at night. She wanted to be licensed and launch a nail polish line.

In 2011, she opened her first salon with a friend called Very Polished in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. The stress of managing people was overwhelming when all Aguirre wanted to do was nails. She left the salon in 2015. Two years later, she ventured out again to work with Neal Farinah, Beyoncé’s hairstylist. After getting her feet wet with Farinah, Aguirre converted a spare room in her boyfriend’s apartment into a nail salon and opened up her books for clients.

“The moment I went on Instagram, like my calendar is open, I didn’t have an empty day,” she recalled. “And to this day, I always tell people I’m so grateful that I’m not one of those nail techs that’s like, ‘oh my God, it’s so slow.’ I don’t have that. I’ve never had that problem. It could be rain, sleet, hail, clients are still coming.”

She jokes that her boyfriend used to ask if only Black women were so routine with their beauty maintenance. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, but I know we don’t play about ourselves.” She continued doing nails in his spare room until July 2018, when she opened another salon. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and New York shut down.

“I [was] exhausted,” she said. “A lot of things started happening when we reopened after COVID.” People were coming in, and she was busy, but something wasn’t quite right. There was a break-in at the shop, and the windows were broken on another occasion. Aguirre felt like she couldn’t get her bearings but needed to keep the salon open for the nail techs working for her.

“And I’m like, this nail thing is really depressing,” Aguirre said. “People don’t know the backstory of how this nail tech is producing this kind of work, like, what you have to go through to just exist in this world, right?”

Last summer, Aguirre decided to go full-time again, working for herself, but this time with an agent, a client of hers who would get her editorial jobs here and there. She was already working with celebrities such as singer-actor Janelle Monae, whom Nelms introduced Aguirre to in 2017, but the agent booked her with Richardson. “Sha’Carri’s dope,” Aguirre said. “She’s a beautiful person.”

The pair met right after Richardson was suspended from competing in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after testing positive for THC. That same year, Aguirre did her nails for The ESPYS.

“She was quite quiet, very nice still,” Aguirre said. “But, you know, you could tell something was wrong. Fast-forward to last year, my agent booked me for her Oikos shoot. I get there, see her, and I’m like, there’s something different.”

Aguirre says she couldn’t pinpoint it then, but looking back, Richardson’s mood seemed lighter. She was smiling more. Since March, Aguirre has done Richardson’s nails for Sprite’s Obey Your Thirst campaign and her Powerade commercial. When she couldn’t physically be on set, as with the Vogue shoot in Florida and Nike’s On Air event in Paris, she overnighted her a custom-designed set of nails.

“I send her a note like, ‘hey, put a lot of glue on these, because if you win a medal, I need you to hold the medal with not one nail missing! Why did you have to win a gold medal in Budapest and you’re holding it and you have two nails missing?’ And her coach is like, ‘you’re the one who does the nails? Can you figure out a way to not have them things fall off?’ ” she said with a laugh.

Richardson held up her silver medal, coming in second to Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia in the women’s 100-meter, not missing any nails, and when she helped her teammates win the 100-meter relay Round 1 on Thursday. Richardson’s final Paris nail look debuts Friday.

“She’s vibrant,” Aguirre said, describing what she enjoys most about working with Richardson. “She’s focused. She says what she means, her word is her bond. And how she treats people? It’s so easy to work with her. She’s amazing at what she does and, so if I can bring a little bit of extra to the table while working with her, I’m here for it.”