Hello Emy started because I got tired of pinning things I never actually made.
I'm Emy Claire, and for years my saved folders were a graveyard of nail sets I could not recreate, hair tutorials that assumed I owned six different brushes, and outfit posts styled on people whose lives looked nothing like mine. I had thousands of pins and maybe four things I had actually pulled off. At some point the collecting itself became the hobby, which is a sad thing to admit.
So I started paying attention differently. Not to what looked good in a photo, but to what looked good and was actually achievable, and what the difference between those two things usually is.
🎯 This site is the result.
I'm Emy Claire. I'm based in Virginia, and I have been doing my own hair and nails at home for about a decade, mostly out of stubbornness, and I have spent an unreasonable number of hours looking at other people's.
I'm not a stylist and I have no cosmetology license. I want to be upfront about that, because the internet has enough people implying credentials they don't have. What I actually am is someone who has spent years attempting this stuff in a bathroom with bad lighting, and who now spends a lot of time looking at what other people are making, sorting the achievable from the aspirational, and figuring out which is which.
That second part is most of what I do here, and it's worth being honest about. Nobody has personally tested four hundred nail designs. I certainly haven't. What I have done is looked at thousands of them, tried plenty, failed at more, and developed a pretty reliable eye for which ideas hold up outside a studio and which ones only exist as photographs.
Three categories, and they overlap more than you'd expect. A good manicure changes what you want to wear.
A haircut changes how you do everything else. It's connected, so it lives together.
Braids, waves, updos, cuts, and colour ideas, plus the specific unsolved problem of hair that will not hold a curl. A lot of these posts are collections of ideas rather than step-by-step tutorials, and I try to be clear about which is which. When I gather twenty options, I'm telling you what I'd consider, not claiming I wore all twenty.
My favourite corner of the site. Colour combinations, seasonal sets, shapes, and design ideas, alongside the at-home techniques I've actually worked out for myself. Most nail content online skips the part where you find out something needs three coats and a steady hand you don't have. I try not to.
Outfit ideas built around clothes you probably already own. Less trend-chasing, more figuring out what to do with what's already in the closet. I am not going to tell you to buy a new wardrobe every March.
Most of my posts are curated collections. I go looking for ideas across a lot of sources, and I'm picky. I cut anything that only works with salon lighting, professional application, or hair that behaves nothing like most people's. What's left is what makes the post.
If a hairstyle needs a second pair of hands, that goes in the post too. The single most annoying thing about beauty content is finding out halfway through that you were never going to be able to do this.
The at-home techniques, the tools that were worth buying, the shortcuts that actually work: those come from my own long history of doing this to myself, usually badly at first.
When an idea or image comes from someone else's work, it gets attributed. I'm not in the business of passing off other people's creativity as my own.
Things change, better ideas surface, and old posts get revisited rather than left to rot.
My favourite corner of the site. Colour combinations, seasonal sets, shapes, and design ideas, alongside the at-home techniques I've actually worked out for myself. Most nail content online skips the part where you find out something needs three coats and a steady hand you don't have. I try not to.
You can reach me at contact@helloemy.com or through the contact page.
Thanks for being here. Go paint your nails.
