By Eva Ortega. From February 2021.

  @xnailsbycarolinax

Before the pandemic froze communities nationwide, 20-year-old Carolina Medina’s daily routine may have played out like a kaleidoscope of carefree hangouts with friends, spry college campus antics, and the type of late-night mishaps everyone regrets in the morning.

Instead, Medina finds herself making the drive to her job at Burdick’s Preschool for Little Children in El Monte every morning, where she leads a small classroom of children with education-based activities and playtime. After work, she’ll return home and work more—this time as a freelance nail technician, accepting appointments from a room at the back of her parent’s house.

    Medina also attends Rio Hondo College full-time, where she aspires to obtain a Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education, ultimately hoping to pursue her dream job as a therapist for foster children from impoverished backgrounds.

    Medina says the job she currently holds helps her gain much needed experience. 

    “I really like it at Burdick’s because it helps me build a really strong connection with kids [I work with],” Medina says. “They allow me to work with all age groups so it helps me get to know them better.”

    She admits that balancing the trio of acts tends to stretch her thin. However, having grown tired of dealing with inflated pricing and rude nail technicians, Medina first decided to take on the craft in late 2019.

    After learning completely from YouTube videos, Medina began sharing posts of her new hobby on social media, to which her followers quickly reacted.

    “Everyone started commenting and private messaging me saying: ‘OMG, you do nails?’ “ Medina said. “I was clear about letting them know that I was just learning—that I was self-taught.”

    From then on, the practice took on a more polished form, with Medina providing friends and relatives with any set of their choice.

    Medina says her small business, which she playfully deems her “side hustle”, was already on the rise in February 2020; although, it wasn’t until nail salons across California shut down due to Coronavirus that business truly took off. 

    “I obviously stopped doing nails at first because I was scared [for my health],” Medina said, “But I started taking lots of precautions. Literally, I cleaned everything like crazy.”

    At one point, Medina recalls her mother expressing concern over the influx of people that were passing in and out of the house during appointments. However, with her previous job at a daycare in Alhambra indefinitely closed, Medina was relying solely on her businesses’ income at the time. 

    When prompted for more detail, the young entrepreneur is hesitant.

    “I don’t know, It was just tough.” 

    Medina’s younger sister, 18-year-old Nadia Lugo, who says she has helped “guide” her sister’s “social media presence” and gained her clients “through word-of-mouth” has always been proud and supportive.

Her current sanitation routine includes sterilizing tools and furniture between clients, leaving windows and doors open for proper ventilation, and a mandatory face-mask policy. 

    Medina also credits the popular app Tiktok and it’s #supportsmallbusiness trend, which holds over 1-billion views, for her recent success.

All trends aside, Medina makes it a point to emphasize the roots acrylic nails have in black and Latino culture. Similar to other nail-fanatics, such as Tayo Bero, who describes her acrylics as a way to “resist stale stereotypes” that are “disproportionately harmful to Black women,” Medina feels women of color face far more negative reactions than their white counterparts.

“I’m glad acrylics are trendy because everyone deserves to feel like a baddie,” Medina said with a laugh. “I just wish more credit was given where it’s due.” 

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