Fresh Sets Examines the Fine Art of Nail Art
As a small-scale painter, I’ve been interested in meticulous manicures since 2005, when my mom presented me with the holy text — Klutz’s Nail Art tutorial book with six peel-off nail polishes. Twenty years later, I’m pivoting into DIY gel nails and poring over beauty and culture writer Tembe Denton-Hurst’s Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World (2025), which contextualizes advanced manicures as a form of visual art and cultural expression.
In an insurmountable sea of nail art tutorials, product reviews, and inspiration pics proliferating across social media, Denton-Hurst’s photo book is a static, handheld snapshot of the state of fine art manicures today. Casting a wide net, Denton-Hurst included select interviews and work samples from 35 international artists from Mexico, India, Japan, Korea, and across the United States and Europe. In a brief introduction, she traces the exponential growth of salon culture and nail art in the last two centuries, highlighting how Vietnamese immigrants began to shape the industry in the United States in the 1970s and the historical significance of custom nail art as a form of personal style for Black women.
In an interview, Denton-Hurst told me that the driving force behind the project was not only to get readers to appreciate their nail artists more, but also to call attention to both the fine arts and fashion applications of the form by highlighting artists who are doing boundary-breaking work in the field.
“ The thing that was most interesting to me was the range of experience across each included artist,” she said in a phone call. “Some have been doing nails for many, many years whereas other people had come to the practice more recently.”
Denton-Hurst noted that many art and design workers ended up pivoting to nail art in 2020 during quarantine; I did, too. With the pandemic raging around us, nail art became an outlet for both anxiety and boredom, allowing artists to regain a sense of control and reignite their creativity during a time of uncertainty and limited resources.
“ I feel like it’s so emblematic of the way that the nail art conversation is shifting and that people who are classically trained, are saying, ‘You know what? I should bring this to nails,’” she continued.
This new era of avant-garde nails has continued to evolve in the last few years, as material science advances in tandem with human imagination. Denton-Hurst cites the 2017 inception of the Aprés Gel-X nail extension system as a catalyst for experimental nail art, and new products for two- and three-dimensional designs regularly shake up the industry. From 3D elements on natural nail foundations to what I could only describe as wearable sculptures sprouting from fingertips, nail art has far exceeded the boundaries of a curved millimeters-long canvas.
Photographed in Fresh Sets, sculpted novelty nails by Juan Alvear and Nathan Taylor stand out as structurally and conceptually marvelous. Moscow-based artist Margarita Tsibizova embraces the grotesque with her signature “dirtycore” claw extensions, while Tahvya “Tav” Krok‘s fine-line precision makes references to art historical forms, from Manga to mandalas and Victor Vasarely’s Op art to Claude Monet’s Impressionism.
Fresh Sets ultimately emphasizes manicures as a medium for cultural and personal expression for artists and clients alike. Shirking racialized and gendered critiques of nail art as impractical, frivolous, and unprofessional, Denton-Hurst emphasizes that this wearable art form isn’t just an extension of our fingertips, but an extension of ourselves, our heritage, our interests, and our stories.
