How do you make a bead look half-eaten without it cracking?

The trick is to do the bite in raw clay, not carve it into a finished bead. Carving baked or plastic beads almost always chips because the blade grabs and tears instead of slicing. If you make the berries from polymer clay instead, you can press the bite in before baking. Scoop a crescent out with the rounded end of a small paintbrush or a ball stylus, go slow and twist rather than drag, and it leaves a clean shallow hollow with a soft edge that looks exactly like teeth marks. Then you can dab a bit of pale green clay or paint inside for the flesh and bake the whole thing once. If you're stuck with the bead you alredy carved, you can still rescue it. Wet sanding is your friend here. Get some fine wet/dry sandpaper, dip it in water, and work the ragged edges in small circles untill they smooth out. The water keeps the plastic dust from going everywhere and stops the sandpaper from clogging. Start with a mid grit and finish with a fine one. It takes a few minutes but it turns a chewed edge into a soft one.

For the shine problem, skip the nail polish. It dries glossy and you'll never get it to match the matte berries. Two better options: either seal just the notch with a matte varnish, or do what I ended up doing, which is giving every berry one thin coat of matte sealer at the end. That evens out the whole bracelet so the bitten one doesn't stand out for the wrong reason, and it also protects the paint on the flesh part from wearing off. One more thing that helped mine look right: after painting the flesh, I dragged a toothpick with barely any dark paint on it around the rim of the bite to suggest juice staining. Sounds fussy but it takes thirty seconds and sells the whole effect.

I made a cherry bracelet last summer and ran into the same shine mismatch, though mine was from a glossy glaze on everthing. I actually ended up liking the bitten one being slightly diferent, my sister said it looked like someone snacked on it mid-string, which was the joke anyway. Curious if the pale green flesh color reads right up close? Mine looked too flat until I added a tiny dot of darker green near the edge like a seed pocket. Still figuring out this forum stuff so sorry if this belongs somewhere else.

I'd push back on the coat-everything-in-matte-sealer advice. I tried that exact thing on a strawberry strand last year and it muted my gradient badly, the dark berries went chalky and the pale ones lost thier punch. Sealer isn't invisible no matter what the label says. If the notch shines a little, honestly that might work in your favor, real fruit skin has some sheen so one glossy-ish berry among matte ones reads as fresher. I'd test the sealer on a leftover bead from the same batch before committing to coating the whole bracelet, beacuse there's no undoing it once it's on.

I learned a lot about the sealer issue from the replies. When I made a similar stone bracelet with small painted flowers, I found that putting the paint on the bead first, then sealing it lightly, gives a much better finish. If you paint and then seal, the paint doesn't crack when it dries. I used a very light mist coat, not a heavy dip. My question is, since we are doing a gradient from green to dark, do you find that the dye for the color gets darker as the bead gets more opaque, or is it just about mixing the colors? I keep worrying the paler ones look too washed out next to the deep ones.

I've always found that the paint medium makes a huge difference on these tiny pieces. I wouldn't use heavy acrylics for the pale green flesh; they dry too thick and matte. I'd try thinning down a craft paint with a drop of clear matte varnish instead. It gives it that little bit of translucency like actual fruit flesh would have, even when painted.

Also, keep the bite really small. If the notch is too big compared to the whole berry, it just looks like a deliberate cutout. If you keep the crescent cut minimal, it mimics something quick nibbled off, which I think sells the effect way better.