I Won a Scratch Stars Award... By Trusting My Gut
If you'd told me five years ago that in 2026 I'd be standing on a stage collecting the Scratch Stars award for Gel Polish Stylist of the Year, I think I might have laughed.
Not because I didn't think I could, but because life always seemed to have other plans.
When I started seeing clients in 2017, I worked from a little room at in my flat. Like so many nail techs, I spent time building a client base one appointment at a time until I eventually moved into a salon in 2018. It finally felt like everything was starting to move in the right direction... and then COVID happened.
Just like that, everything was put on hold.
By the time the industry began finding its feet again and we came out of lockdown, I was pregnant. Suddenly I was a mum (something I had never ever planned for), and anyone who's been through that stage knows how quickly your priorities change. Competitions weren't even on my radar. Most days I was just trying to remember whether I'd eaten, let alone think about where I wanted my career to be in five years time.
I never stopped loving nails though and tried to see clients throughout all of this (I think I only took about 2 months maternity leave!).
When life became a little less chaos, I had a choice. I could pick up where I'd left off and carry on with what was familiar, or I could really see what I was capable of. I chose the second one.
There wasn't one big turning point where everything suddenly changed, although leaving the salon and moving into a tattoo studio was definitely the moment I felt I became me, not just an extension of someone else. I kept pushing what I felt were within my capabilities. I painted. I practised. I entered Scratch Stars (first in 2023, then again in 2025 where I made Finalist, and then again in 2026 where I won!). I started writing and hosting Tiktok lives hoping to inspire and share my knowledge with others. I said yes to opportunities that scared me senseless, whether that was partnering with brands I had always respected or putting my work in front of people who knew far more than I did. I stopped thinking about building clients and started thinking about building a career going forwards.
That's really why I entered Scratch Stars this year. Of course I wanted to win. Anyone who says they enter competitions “just for the experience” is probably lying. But that wasn't the reason I entered.
Education has become a huge part of where I want my career to go. Be that online courses, workshops or public speaking, I ask people to trust me with their learning. I don't believe being an “Award Winning Nail Artist” automatically makes someone a great educator (it doesn’t!). I've learnt from incredible educators who have never entered a competition, and I've seen phenomenal competition artists who have no interest in teaching.
But competitions do give you accountability. They force you to justify every decision you make. They make you solve problems under pressure (during the 2026 judged practical day I took the lid off my ombre brush to find all the bristles had caught and bent! I had to take a deep breath, not panic and find a work around without losing too much time) and commit to your ideas instead of tweaking them over and over. They push you outside your comfort zone in a way very few other things do. I wanted to challenge myself, but I also wanted people who might learn from me in the future to know that I hold myself to the same standards that I encourage them to aim for.
That's where my Scratch Stars practical judged day set “Humanity's Journey to the Moon” came from.
Gel Polish Stylist of the Year 2026 Winner - practical judged set
We weren’t given a theme to stick to, just an hour to do it in. It would have been far easier to paint ten space-themed nails with no story, but that didn’t interest me. I wanted Apollo and Artemis to feel like two chapters of the same story. One hand looking back at (in my opinion) humanity's greatest achievement, the other looking forwards to where we're going next.
As far as I was concerned, every nail had to have a reason for being there.
I'm a bit of a space nerd, so I disappeared down far more rabbit holes than was probably necessary. I started reading about Apollo mission transcripts, studying Eagle's landing site on the moon, looking at Orion engineering drawings and questioning whether tiny details that nobody else would probably notice were worth including. They were all important to me. I knew that if someone who understood the subject looked closely, I wanted them to see that I'd respected the history and the facts rather than just borrowed the aesthetics.
The Saturn V rocket represented where the journey began. The Orion trajectory represented where it's heading. The Eagle landing site and the Apollo 11 coordinates grounded the design in facts. The tiny astronaut reminded us that, despite all the engineering and technology, exploration and the journey is still a very human thing. There were many, many, MANY nails that never made the final set because, although they were nice I felt they didn’t add anything to the story. Replacing one of them with the Orion blueprint ended up being one of the best decisions I made because suddenly everything clicked into place.
When competition day came I felt weirdly calm. I'd spent so long questioning every decision that by the time the timer started there wasn't really anything left to question. I knew why every nail was there, they lived in my head rent free (a couple of judges actually commented on “was I doing it from memory” because I didn’t have reference) so all I had to do was paint them.
I honestly don't remember much after my name was announced at the awards. I remember standing up, walking to the stage and trying to process what had just happened, but it's still all a bit of a blur. I think I started my speech with a shellshocked “Hi!” through tears. The part that has stayed with me more than anything else was hearing the judges feedback.
It turns out the most special thing to me was why they'd chosen my design. They weren't talking about one perfect nail or a particular technique. They were talking about the whole design itself. The story. The way the collection worked together. For me, who probably spends longer thinking than painting, that means everything.
There isn't one right way to do nails. There isn't one style that's more worthy than another, one product that magically makes someone a great artist or one trend that everybody has to follow. I think somewhere along the line people started to feel that to be taken seriously in this industry they had to create the same work as everyone else, buy the same products as everyone else and chase the same trends as everyone else.
This set was, for me, about challenging that.
It was one of the biggest creative risks I've ever taken because it wasn't remotely like anything I had seen win before. I didn’t look at previous winners and try to work out what the judges wanted to see. I asked myself whether the story made sense, whether every nail was justified and whether, if someone covered up my name, people who know my work would still recognise it as mine. I asked if I loved them.
I’d say that’s the part I'm proudest of. Not that I won, but that I won with something that feels unapologetically like me! I didn't have to tone it down, make it more commercial or follow whatever the current trend happened to be. The things I'd worried might make it too different were actually the things the judges remembered.
I don't think I'll stop doubting myself. Knowing me, I'll still redo things countless times, still change my mind halfway through a design and still wonder whether I've completely lost the plot halfway through every set I ever create. I don't think that part of being creative ever really goes away and I think I’m okay with that.
What has changed is that I trust my gut more than I did before.
I encourage other nail techs to stop worrying so much about fitting into a mould they think the industry expects and spend more time figuring out what they actually want to say through their work. It would have been very easy to write those words and never really listen to them myself. Instead, I entered one of the biggest competitions in the industry with a set that was built entirely around an idea I genuinely cared about.
Thankfully, it turns out that was enough.
Host Aston Merrygold, Myself, Charlotte Lowe, Education Brand Manager of OPI and Helena Biggs, Scratch editorial and partnerships director and organiser of the awards
Photo credit Jon Bradley www.jonbradley.co.uk
