Aquamarine is a 2006 movie featuring 2 teenagers Claire and Hailey (played by Emma Roberts and JoJo respectively) who meet a mermaid Aquamarine (played by Sara Paxton) who’s washed ashore and looking to prove that love exists.
Of course, there’s also a villain in the form of mean girl Cecilia (Arielle Kebbel) and a love interest in the form of hunky lifeguard Raymond (Jake McDorman).
Notice how you barely see her knees in this tail?
Aquamarine is able to walk on land with the help of legs. But if she touches water, her legs disappear and her mermaid tail appears. She’ll also turn back into a mermaid at night.
I LOVED this movie. I had the VCD and watched it over and over for so many years! It’s hard to find a lot of live-action mermaid movies and TV shows, other than H2O or Splash. While the orange tail in Splash didn’t really speak to me, I loved the blue/aquamarine tail in this movie.
There is almost-always an iconic bathtub scene in mermaid movies. I guess where else can you hang out with your tail? Aquamarine here was eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in the appropriate Phish Food flavour.
JMB FX Studio was the Mermaid Tail Effects Designer / Supervisor for Aquamarine. The Australian makeup effects studio also worked on Fishtales (2007), H2O: Just Add Water (2006) and its spin-off Mako Mermaids (2013).
Sara Paxton‘s silicone mermaid tail weighed over 100 pounds (45kg) and was approximately 8 feet in length. Sara had a 4am call-time every morning as she required 2 hours to get her hair and facial make-up applied, and then another 2 hours to have her tail fitted. Yikes! Mer-beauty is pain.
A behind-the-scenes look from JMB FX studio showcasing one of four mermaid tails produced. I believe this was what they referred to as “the hero tail”. It was a foam latex skin with a silicone skin over the top. They sculpted it over Sara’s body, and covered in 5,000 hand painted scales. They used this mostly for close-up shots.
Sara described wearing the tail as “It feels fishy. It feels like I’m wearing a big wetsuit.”
A behind-the-scenes look at Sara in what they called “the stunt tail”, manoeuvring a complicated backflip trick that appears in the beginning of the movie.
They also created a ‘skirt tail’ for Sara to wear to hide the specialized, cable-controlled animatronic tail.
More behind-the-scenes:
I do wonder what happened to this silicone tail after they wrapped up the filming. Sara Paxton told People magazine that she didn’t get to keep the tail. “Each tail was a million dollars and made out of some NASA rubber and glass,”. (I’m not sure what she meant by that!)
It would be amazing if we could see the tail resurface somewhere. Although I suppose since it’s made of foam latex and silicone, it was probably made specifically to look for good filming, instead of for longevity.
Either way, it lives on beautifully in the movie!
Did you watch the movie? What were your favourite mermaid movies?
Much Love,
Fari
Unicorn Mermaid 
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