If you catch Maame Efuwa Aikins staring a little too intently at a dead flower on a London escalator, don’t worry. She’s just working.
At 23, she sits at the intersection of nail tech and sculptor. Her background is a collision of worlds, born to a Ghanaian father and Japanese mother, and raised in a quiet part of the Japanese countryside before landing in London at 18. Even now, her creative mind loops back to the back garden of her family home that borders a forest, a space she credits for the reach of her imagination. While she credits Japan for providing the physical landscape for her upbringing, Ghana occupies a constant space in her head—a place she feels a magnetic pull toward and wants to visit again with a total blank canvas.
“I really wanted this skill called patience that everyone seemed to have. I felt like I was always floating around.”
The move to start creating her high-texture 3D nails only happened in September 2024, out of a moment where she felt trapped by the creative limits she put on herself. “I felt trapped by the limits I put myself in,” she says of the time before the breakthrough. “I wanted to make sure that I wanted to do something… only for myself.”
That decision to stop overthinking and start sculpting turned into a lifeline. Now, the process is a ritual. To get into the zone, Efuwa has to disappear. Her phone goes on “do not disturb”—sometimes full airplane mode—and she creates a vacuum around her desk where the only noise is the soundtrack of childhood cartoons playing on a loop. “It’s like having a conversation with myself,” she says. “A very intimate time.”
She rarely plans her sets ahead of time. Instead, she lets the materials do the heavy lifting, reacting to them in real-time. The inspiration is rarely a Pinterest board, it’s usually something jarring. A random video of someone using shrimp heads as finger caps or a dead flower handed to her on the London tube? That’s the mood board. She finds herself chasing that weirdness.
“I saw a video of someone putting shrimp heads on their finger… and I was like, oh my god, I need to make shrimp nails.”
To Efuwa, nails are a form of body modification. She isn’t interested in “pretty.” She thrives in the uncanny valley—the gap between the very real and the total unreal. She wants her work to be recognizable, but slightly off, creating a visual tension that makes you look twice. When she isn’t sculpting tiny masterpieces, she’s shooting “mockumentary photography,” a surrealist take on real life that pulls inspiration from her grandmother’s massive archive of photo albums.
It’s a heavy workload for a 23-year-old, but she keeps herself grounded with a mantra that sounds less like an affirmation and more like a creative manifesto: “My creativity is my responsibility and I am devoted to crafting a life that I’m proud of. Every step I take, I work with strength and patience. My passion is not a blaze, it is my legacy.”
Her process has a soundtrack of its own. You can find her in the studio with these tracks on repeat:
Claim It by Klein
Grateful by Kush Jones
Creator by Santigold
Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes
Written By: HQ
Photography: Shenell Wellington
Creative Direction: BLACKSTAR Haus
Creative Co-Direction: Maame Efuwa Aikins
Stylist: Jada McClaren
Hair: Tressa Mode
