How To Remove Glitter Nail Polish

Have any of you been left wondering how the heck I am going to chisel all that sparkly nail polish off my fingernails, and whether I would be able to make any other weekend plans? Well never fear. See, I have a little secret to share that might just change your feelings about glitter nail polish forever. Behold: My easy trick for removing glitter (or really dark) nail polish in just one swipe.

Here, this nail is encrusted in about 8 coats of OPI The Living Daylights (I wanted to make the sequins look as dense as they looked in the bottle!). Clearly, this nail polish would shred any ordinary cotton ball or tissue that dared step to it.

So here's how to approach the removal of serious nail polish: Soak a small cotton ball in nail polish remover, place it directly on the nail polish, then slide a small hair elastic around to hold it in place. (I happen to have perfectly finger-sized little Goody elastics because I have a hair updos. Otherwise, those little clear hair elastics work too; you just have to wind them around twice and be gentle doing so, or they break.)

Leave the cotton ball(s) on for a few minutes. Even in the case of this extreme multi-coat sequin nail polish, I only left the remover on for three minutes or so, and that more than did the trick. Next, put some nail polish remover on a makeup-remover wipe--the exfoliating type works especially well at pulling all the glitter off the nail. The wipe is stronger than a tissue and lets you take off the already-softened polish in literally one swipe, but you could also use the cotton ball that's already there.

And that's it. I came up with this method based on the technique used to remove gel nail polish, where they use foil instead of the hair elastic--I like my version better because I am never going to be patient enough to cut ten foil strips, and the elastic holds the cotton so securely I can even use the mouse pad on my laptop while my nails soak (probably not an awesome idea because a renegade drop of remover could zap my keyboard ... but whatever, I like to live on the edge).

Hopefully I just saved you lots of nail-polish-removal work this holiday season, so you can spend more time shopping!