“I’ve always struggled to define my artistic style because I don’t think it fits into one specific category,” Sophia Breznikar admits. It’s an honest answer from someone whose work refuses to sit still. She layers textures over patterns, sets sculptural elements beside hand-painted details, and pulls inspiration from just about anywhere. Her signature, she explains, “shows up in my interpretation rather than in one specific aesthetic.”
Her Instagram, @sofarnailbar, proves it. Her bio describes her as an “LA-based nail artist,” specializing in “sculptural & editorial sets,” and the grid backs that up. One set is zebra stripes and polka dots, the next is smoky airbrushed lilac, and after that comes a row of glossy black-cherry stilettos. Mint almonds dotted with tiny silver studs sit next to long, clear sculpted tips covered in 3D charms. Her nails have also shown up in some very visible places, including Ice Spice’s “Thootie” music video and the custom 3D set Xochitl Gomez wore to the Cat in the Hat premiere.
Getting here took a detour. Before she ever picked up a nail brush professionally, Breznikar earned a UCLA degree and built a career in the nonprofit world. Only then did she give herself permission to pursue the thing she’d been doing since she was a kid.
“If I could decorate or customize something, I would,” she says of her childhood. “Minimalism was never really my thing.”
That much was obvious early. She sewed outfits for her Build-A-Bear out of Joann fabric, painted and drew constantly, and still remembers spending hours working through one of those massive early-2000s art kits. The creative people around her taught her to sculpt jewelry from polymer clay, take photos, and even tile mosaics. Her taste formed just as early: bright colors, bold patterns, and funky accessories.
Nails came into the picture almost immediately. Every drugstore trip became a campaign for new polish, and when she got a nail stamping kit, her mom and older sister became her very first clients, willing or not, sitting still while she pressed tiny flowers and butterflies onto their fingertips. The bedroom she shared with that sister was neon green and wonderfully chaotic, full of old CDs, makeup, drawings, and whatever craft project she was in the middle of.
At UCLA, Breznikar studied International Development Studies, drawn to community-based work where she could help people directly and give back. The art came along anyway. Every college apartment had an art corner with an easel and paint for study breaks, and her love for nails grew into a full-blown obsession, with hours spent hunched over her desk testing acrylic powders while her room reeked of monomer.
“The time around graduation was a blur,” she recalls. She finished school toward the end of COVID, when no one was quite sure what came next, and took a job at a nonprofit. A few years in, unhappiness and burnout caught up with her. Instead of walking away with no plan, she enrolled in night classes at nail school while still working full time. Once her license was in hand, she put in her two weeks.
“I always loved working with my hands and creating,” she reflects, “so it felt like returning to a part of myself that I hadn’t been prioritizing.”
She’d later sum up that decision in an Instagram caption: “last year i stopped splitting my energy and put it all into nails. grateful for the projects, the people, and the trust.”
Nail school didn’t make her an artist. “Creatively, I was mostly self-taught,” she says. By her first class she had already spent years experimenting on her own hands, and the program focused on manicuring fundamentals. What school gave her was the technical foundation, theory behind years of trial and error, and the challenge of refining everything she’d taught herself into something more precise. The moment she knew nails could be real art actually came long before her license, when she made a press-on set inspired by an artist’s painting and spent hours recreating every tiny detail, one nail at a time.
“The best part is figuring out which parts translate best onto such a small canvas,” she explains of her process today. Some days she recreates a reference almost exactly, and other days she pulls just one color, texture, or shape and builds from there. Her feed shows that translation happening in real time. In a recent post of discounted freestyle sets, each numbered design is a one-time drop (“each design is available only once!”), and the top tier is built from an entire moodboard of leopard print, zebra stripes, tortoiseshell, and paint swatches.
Even how she shoots her work feels like an extension of that customize-everything kid. Her sets don’t sit on sterile white backdrops. They show up against chunky silver rings, slouchy vintage bags, leopard print, cluttered keychains, and saturated editorial shoots. Some of those shoots are bright and color-blocked, and others are grainy black-and-white.
The atmosphere at her station is just as eclectic. Early-2000s music fills the room, with a few new hits sprinkled in, and the conversation drifts from reality TV to family drama to climate issues to what she and her clients think is actually wrong with men. Somewhere in the middle of it, she locks in, the chatter carrying on while her hands handle the detail work.
“At 21, I never would’ve guessed I’d become a manicurist, but I wouldn’t want knowing that to change any of the choices that got me here,” she says. Asked what she’d tell her younger self, freshly holding a diploma, she wouldn’t reveal a thing. She’s grateful she tried the conventional route first. “I think I needed that experience to figure out what I really wanted for myself.”
At its core, Sophia Breznikar’s story is proof that the detour can be part of the path. The girl who stamped butterflies onto her sister’s nails in a neon green bedroom took the long way around and ended up right back where she started. This time she has a license, celebrity clients, and a brand-new West Hollywood studio she shares with fellow artist @themartaverse. As their joint announcement put it: “See you in WeHo, hotties.”
