Her friend, celebrity hairstylist Nikki Nelms, had to tell Aguirre how special the moment was. “She called me and said, ‘Friend, you made it to the cover of fashionI don’t think I’ll put it on the cover of fashion.’ And I say, ‘I did, didn’t I?’ You need people to remind you of your successes. Sometimes you forget to live in the here and now.”

It was an opportunity to step back and appreciate the recognition and all the work and sacrifices Aguirre has made to get her business to this point. “It wasn’t just a little bit of nail design, you know, because that’s how the industry can be,” she said. “Hair and makeup often take center stage, but nail technicians often feel left out and not as important. On the cover of fashion was damn awesome, please excuse my language.”

Plus, Richardson wears her nails well. She speaks expressively and gestures in a way that resembles some of Aguirre’s clients. “Some people talk with their hands like I do, and some are very quiet and gentle. Thank God I don’t have any gentle clients,” she said, laughing.

Aguirre landed Chicago Sky striker Angel Reese as a client after the nail artist’s daughter saw Reese’s social media call for the best beauty treatments while visiting Atlanta. Aguirre and her daughter were driving on the highway when her daughter told her Reese needed a nail job.

“She said, ‘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 and then called Aguirre’s agent. “So my agent literally called me back from the freeway to the time I got to my friend’s house, as soon as we got out of the car, and said, ‘You’re hired!'”

Aguirre said her daughter did the same thing with social media influencer Tabitha Brown, prompting her to message Brown directly on Instagram. She did so and Brown responded, as did actress Aisha Hinds on another occasion.

Up until this point, Aguirre’s career had many ups and downs. She started doing nails at age 12. She is Panamanian and grew up in Brooklyn, where the women in her family ran a salon. Nail design was a fun side job while she was in college, graduating 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 get a license and launch a nail polish line.

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

“When I went on Instagram, my calendar was open, I didn’t have a day off,” she recalled. “And to this day, I always tell people that I’m so thankful that I’m not one of those nail technicians that says, ‘Oh my God, it’s so slow.’ I don’t have that. I’ve never had that problem. It could rain, sleet or hail, and the clients still come.”

She jokes that her boyfriend always asked her if only black women were so routine with their beauty routine. “I said, ‘I don’t know, but I know We we don’t joke about ourselves.” She continued doing nails in his guest room until she opened another salon in July 2018. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and New York City shut down.

“I was exhausted,” she said. “After reopening after COVID, a lot was happening.” People were coming and she was busy, but something wasn’t right. The shop was broken into and on another occasion the windows were smashed. Aguirre felt like she wasn’t managing but needed to keep the salon open for the nail technicians who worked for her.

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

Last summer, Aguirre decided to go back to work full-time and work for herself, but this time with an agent, one of her clients, who gave her editorial work here and there. She was already working with celebrities like singer and actress Janelle Monae, who Nelms introduced Aguirre to in 2017, but the agent booked her with Richardson. “Sha’Carri is awesome,” Aguirre said. “She’s a wonderful person.”

The couple met after Richardson was suspended from competing in the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to a positive THC test. That same year, Aguirre did her nails for the ESPYS.

“She was pretty quiet, but still very nice,” Aguirre said. “But you could tell something was wrong. Fast forward to last year: My agent booked me for her Oikos shoot. I got there, saw her and thought, there’s something different.”

Aguirre says she couldn’t put her finger on it at the time, but looking back, Richardson’s mood seemed better. She smiled more. Since March, Aguirre has been doing Richardson’s nails for Sprite’s Obey your thirst campaign and her Powerade commercial. When she couldn’t physically be on set, like in the fashion For a shoot in Florida and Nike’s On Air event in Paris, she sent her a customized nail set overnight.

“I send her a message like, ‘Hey, put a lot of glue on that because when you win a medal, you have to hold the medal on without a nail coming off! Why did you have to win a gold medal in Budapest and you’re holding it and you’re missing two nails?’ And her coach says, ‘You’re the one who does the nails? Can you think of a way to keep those things from falling off?'” she says, laughing.

Richardson defended her silver medal when she finished second to Julien Alfred of St. Lucia in the women’s 100-meter race without missing a single nail and when she helped her teammates win the first round of the 100-meter relay on Thursday. Richardson’s final Paris nail look will debut on Friday.

“She’s full of energy,” Aguirre said, describing what she likes most about working with Richardson. “She’s focused. She says what she means, her word counts. And the way she treats people? She’s so easy to work with. She’s great at what she does, and if I can add a little extra in working with her, I’m here for it.”