Happy Holidaze the eighteenth- How to take it all off again.

I've shown a lot of different nail art here over the last few weeks. I've done glitter looks, rhinestones, lots and lots of layers. Tonight, I'll show you how I take my nail polish off. 

I know, you're thinking you already know how to take off nail polish. I thought I did too. It was no fun, it was tedious, and if I were wearing glitter it was downright painful at times. The scrubbing of cotton pads against my nails would make my nail beds sore. When you consider how much I love glitter (and wear it), you'll understand why I hated removing nail polish.

Then one day I saw a video from Colette of My Simple Little Pleasures, and my entire nail polish experience changed. I tried her method and was stunned. I told a friend, who actually avoided wearing nail polish because of how frustrating removal was. I told another friend, and another, and finally realized that hey, most people don't know how to remove nail polish easily!

It's time for that to come to an end. There's no reason to hurt when you remove your nail polishes. Even glitter is easy to remove when you do it this way. All you need are two things: cottonballs and nail polish remover. Leave the acetone on the shelf, you won't need it today!

I use the large cottonballs, and tear them into small pieces. I can take off all my nail polish with 2 cottonballs, even when I wear glitter polish!

The nice thing is that I don't need an enormous amount of cotton for this method. All I need is enough to cover my nail and get it nice and saturated with nail polish remover.

You need to saturate the small section of cotton and place it onto your nail. Squish it down nicely with your fingers so that it soaks the nail evenly with remover. This will hold the cotton in place while you repeat the process with your other fingers.

By this point, you're seriously stylish. It's an attractive look, what can I say?

Then you wait. You only wait for a few minutes, but it feels like an eternity while you can't use your hands. I tend to do one hand at a time so that I'm not totally helpless.

After a few times of doing this, you'll figure out how to know if it's been sitting long enough. You'll be able to feel the polish wiggling under the cotton when you press on it. It's hard to explain, but trust me, you'll know.

Once you've reached that point, you simply press firmly on the cotton and slide it off your nail. The polish will slip right off with it!

As you can see, the process took off almost everything in one swipe, leaving the edges of my fingers clean and keeping any glitter or leftover color inside the cotton instead of on my skin. I fold the piece of cotton so that the polish is on the inside so that I can use a clean edge to wipe down the grooves at the sides of my nails.

Don't worry, it sounds more complex than it is. You're really just trying to capture all those little edge bits that didn't come off with the main swipe.

As an example of how well this works, I took pictures of a couple of pieces of cotton right after sliding my polish off. As you can see, the water decals I'd been wearing are still almost perfect, as is the polish in all its layers.  None smeared around, getting on my skin or requiring scrubbing to remove!

For the record, I used this method tonight to remove the new Milani One-Coat Glitter polishes. This was an intense amount of polish- base coat, two layers of super-intense glitter, and two or three layers of topcoat. The polish removed just as easily, leaving no glitter on my skin and requiring no scrubbing. It's made such an amazing difference for me that now I'm willing to wear almost any polish at least once!

So the next time you're faced with taking your polish off, try this method. It may save you time, energy, and even a bit of pain!