How This Woman Paints Hyperrealistic Nail Art

[Narrator] This woman uses tiny brushes

to create ultra-realistic portraits

that are just an inch tall and half an inch wide

on a curved canvas.

My name is Vivian Xue Rahey and I am a nail art scientist.

[Narrator] That's right, nail art science.

This is not your grandma's manicure.

Secret messages that glow in the dark,

thermochromic paints that change color,

and ultra realistic portraits that you have

to see to believe.

I was just sitting at a restaurant

and I had Dwight Schrute on my nails

and somebody came up to me and was like, Is that Dwight?

And I'm like, It sure is!

That's one thing I love about nails because,

as long as I've done this, I've not failed

to have people have this really vivacious reaction to it.

It's never like, Oh, that's pretty cool.

It's like, Oh my God!

[upbeat music]

[Producer] Okay, this is weird,

but has anyone asked you to do nails for their pet?

No, not for a pet, but we have been asked

to do nails for dead bodies.

[Narrator] Wait, what?

There are some people that have put me actually

on their funeral wishlist and,

I have to have nails from Vivian.

Don't disrespect me by putting other nails

on or something. [laughs]

[Narrator] Okay, let's back up.

In 2016, Vivian was working as a software engineer,

painting her own nails during her free time.

I was doing crazy stuff

like painting Arnold Schwartzenegger,

the Terminator movies on my nails or painting stuff

that people just normally wouldn't really get.

I see a lot of people doing pretty stuff

or princess-y stuff and I'm like,

No, dude, let's put Rush Hour 2 on my nails,

so it kind of resonated with a lot of different audiences

as opposed to just nails as a pretty accessory.

[Narrator] Within a few months,

she had over a million followers on TikTok.

People started DMing, asking for various things like,

Can I get this character? Can I get this portrait?

Oh my God, can you do that for me?

Oh my God, I'm super into that too.

Or, Oh my God, you should open a shop,

or something like that.

I love doing portraits.

Portraits is my favorite thing to do.

I've done Hagrid and Dumbledore

with Snape and Lupin and McGonagall.

I've done Post Malone, Billy Eilish.

I did do a Bob Ross, Grogu. Also done Mando.

I do have an affinity for villains.

I did the Night King from Game of Thrones, the Terminator.

I've also done Voldemort.

[Narrator] Something to keep in mind

with Vivian's portraits, her canvas is curved.

The artwork then goes on a moving hand

that's meant to be seen from many different angles.

Well, I have to almost architect it

so that the positioning of it is conducive

to viewing it from all different types of angles.

I've done a ton of Marvel characters,

Thor and Loki, Wanda Maximoff.

The ones that I have on right now,

which is all three Spidermen.

Oh my gosh, I almost forgot about my Thanos nails.

I loved that set because it was the iconic,

you know, him with the Infinity Gauntlet.

I was able to do a little video where I snapped.

My face and character painting technique is rooted

in spatial awareness and dot plotting.

I work from the center outward

so that there's room to make corrections.

And so what I do is I use different facial features

as anchors for another facial feature.

So I'll, say, start with one eyebrow.

And then from that eyebrow,

I can swing from one vine to the next so I'm not

just looking at this overwhelmingly complex subject.

I collect data and the more data that I have,

the more accurately I can place the next feature

and so on and so forth.

The materials that I use

are actually very carefully curated over the years.

I mainly use Japanese brands

of gel paints as my base colors.

I actually started off, I modeled my color collection

off of a watercolor palette.

I figure if real artists who work on canvas

can actually use just these limited amount of colors

to make everything that they need, then why couldn't I?

If Bob Ross can do it, why can't I do it?

In terms of other materials that I like to use,

the Freddy Krueger set that I did,

I was able to use this nude colored builder gel

that is actually used to build nail extensions

to create this fleshiness for his face.

I got to use jelly red to get

that kinda runny blood look to it.

I will use thermochromic pigments

and essentially what happens

is the molecular structure changes

when you expose it to either heat or cold.

And one of my favorite ones is something I like

to call my invisibility pigment

and it's something that changes from black to colorless.

I painted a portrait of Sirius Black.

So what I did was because Sirius perished behind the veil,

I was able to cover up his portrait using

this black to colorless thermal pigment.

And when you exposed him to a little bit of heat,

the black pigment went away and you can kind of see

like a white haze over him and it actually made him look

like he is behind the veil.

[Narrator] Painting with a brush

of only a few millimeters long,

Vivian's portraits can take hours or even days.

Usually the portraiture takes about five to six hours

for just the portrait alone,

but when I get an idea that's stuck in my head,

I will stay up all night to do it

because I'm that laser focused and I enjoy doing it so much.

Moana took me 16 hours.

The death of Sirius Black took 18 hours.

King T'Challa, including the ancestral plane,

took about 10 hours.

The Anastasia nails took seven hours.

The Howl's Moving Castle took seven hours.

Little Mermaid took me six and a half hours.

[Narrator] Jasmine and Rajah took her five hours.

This glow in the dark Happy Haunt set took 11 hours.

The Alicia Silverstone Clueless set took 6.5 hours.

Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings each took over 10 hours.

Once, she spent 40 hours on a single set of nails.

The 40 hour project was a set of Encanto nails.

The customer wanted every single character,

so it was the entire family Madrigal

and it had also their glowing doors

with their powers and their little symbols and stuff.

And I also had a separate section where I did

single nails that pieced together like a puzzle.

And when you put those four nails together,

you could see that it was the prophecy all put together.

Today, I am working on a portrait of Anakin Skywalker

as he is turning to the Dark Side.

We're gonna have half of Hayden Christensen's face

and the other half will be the Darth Vader helmet.

One of the most challenging parts about this one

is that he's kinda turned a little bit,

which is kinda tough because my nail is super curved

and I also have to fabricate some form of shadows.

But right now it's just a lot of blending and a lot

of looking back and forth at the canvas

to make sure that everything from nostril placement

to placement of a specific shadow is all

in line with his facial features.

And because the Dark Side has the red lightsabers,

I want to have kind of a more distinctive red glow

on his face.

So these are gel paints.

It's similar to if you go to a nail salon

and you get gel polish.

It really quickly dries and the way that you dry it

is you use an LED or a UV lamp.

It triggers a chemical reaction

in the gel and dries the polish.

So when I'm working with these textures,

sometimes I need to paint on top of dried paints

and sometimes I need to keep blending

and so I'll just leave it wet and I won't cure

until I need something to be completely solidified

and so it varies a lot when I'm doing these types

of portrait processes.

What happens when I mess up?

Everyone loves to ask me that question.

Because I move so calculatedly,

I don't really have any major mistakes.

I think it's like I will early detect

if something is going awry.

With portraits, you don't just look down all of a sudden

and it's like, Oh my God, the whole thing looks bad,

so I don't really make mistakes like that anymore

because I just learned to check back and forth a lot.

[Producer] Why did you do Magnum condoms?

[laughs]

I love reproducing packaging because I think it's kind

of an exercise into how I can get texts

to look really accurate and how I can even replicate

weird designs on cans or on bottles.

So I did Magnum XL nails for Valentine's Day

and I tweeted at them and I was like,

Just doing my part, guys.

And then they sent me a ton of condoms [laughs]

and so I was like, Okay, thank you!

So we actually put it out for clients to take,

which was kind of awkward, but also really funny

at the same time.

I'm really proud of that Lysol nail.

I painted that at the height of the pandemic

and I think it ended up in a meme

and Snoop Dogg reposted it

and I thought that was the coolest thing.

He didn't tag me, though.

But, you know, Snoop, I see you. That was really cool!

[Narrator] Vivian's success quickly got her to the point

of receiving more custom nail requests

than she could possibly handle alone,

so she began hiring and training other talented artists

to collaborate with.

I started Pamper Nail Gallery and we're based

in the San Francisco Bay area, but we ship nails worldwide.

We've had people order from Dubai,

we've had people order from Shanghai,

we've had people order from the Yukon territory,

so it's pretty much all over the place at this point.

[Narrator] The requests they get keep them on their toes.

There will be people who will make an entire brochure.

There would be people who maybe,

they plan out a wedding set

and they'll have reference photos

and they'll show me their entire life.

There was a dad who ended up sending 40,000 photos

of his daughter growing up.

And he's like, Yeah, just create something, you know,

get to know her and then create something.

We were like, How do we do that?

So it's definitely challenging because people like

to throw curve balls.

It's not just like, Oh, I want Lion King nails.

It's like, Yeah, I want Lion King nails,

but I also want you to explore the depth of the relationship

between these two characters and make it look

like the relationship that I have with my brother.

And we're like, Oh my God,

this is actually getting really deep.

[Narrator] But for Vivian, it's worth it.

Creating wearable art based on these iconic characters

gives her a chance to create community.

I would say that I'm a nerd.

I think that's something to be proud of.

I would much rather talk

about my obsessions and interests with people

and I think that it really cultivates deeper friendships

and relationships because of that shared fandom

or that shared obsession.

So that's actually one of the things I love about it

as a form of self-expression

because it's such a personal experience.

Because I'm looking at my hands all the time

and I pretty much enjoy the most

out of the work that I put in.

And I think the customers of mine see that too,

is that they get it but it's mostly like they enjoy it

for themselves and if somebody happens to get a peak at it,

it's such a moment of instant comradery

because it's like Oh my God, I'm super into that too!

It just really connects people

through a lot of their kind of personal obsessions.