In a suburban Maryland swimming pool, amid scuba divers practicing with oxygen tanks and young children wearing floaties while holding paddle boards, more than a dozen technicolored mermaid tails ...

In 2021, one of Jennings’ silicone tails was featured in a section of the Smithsonian’s “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” exhibit, but that was far from the capstone of her mermaiding career.

There is blood in the water at the Freedom Aquatic and Fitness Center in Manassas, Va. Angela Murray Pavlovsky, 40, emerges from the pool with knuckles raw and red, having scraped them during a ...

A tale of Twin Cities startup In 2012, in their hometown of Minneapolis, the sisters were asked to make mermaid tails for a Renaissance Fair performance. Abby had studied costume design at ...

There’s a flash of red, then green. A pod of merpeople, men and women donning custom silicone and fabric mermaid tails, swim across the spring in a coordinated pattern.

Matthew Quijano has been designing and building mermaid tails for over 10 years. The tails can be worn in ocean water as deep as 70 feet.

Although there is no official census, the mermaids of the Washington area estimate that they have the second-highest population in the country, behind Florida.

In an era of furries, Star Wars reenactments and other popular forms of cosplay, the D.C. region is home to one of the country’s largest mermaiding communities.