Are you frustrated with tedious polish removal?  Especially gel polish removal?

Are you tired of staining your nails yellow?

In this article, you’ll learn:

• Why scrubbing is the worst way to remove polish
• How warm acetone works faster
• How the Soak and Swipe™ method can reduce long-term yellow staining from polish

The Need For Speed

In today’s article, I’m going to share with you that there is a better way!

Trust me, this is one of those things that will change your life forever.

Yep. Nail polish removal just got way easier!

Besides, using a peel off base coat I’ve discovered that the fastest way to remove polish is using my Soak and Swipe™ method.

Some of us don’t want to use a peel off basecoat. If you’re busy like me, you want your manicure to last as long as possible without chipping.

This is obviously a desire for many of us since the new lines of polishes are touting up to 7-10 days of glossy wear.

See It In Action

For those of you ready to start before even finishing this article, here is my quick video tutorial and the written directions. I’ll explain how and why this technique is so amazing later in the article.

What You Need:

• Cotton balls or makeup remover pads
• Cheap kitchen oil
• Acetone
• Manicure Clips

How To Start:

• Cut cotton makeup pads into quarters or unroll a cotton ball into a long strip and cut into nail sized pieces.
• Apply cheap kitchen oil to your skin up to first knuckle. This helps minimize the drying effect acetone has on the skin.
• Thoroughly saturate one piece of cotton with acetone. You want it almost dripping.
• Apply cotton to nail
• Apply manicure clip, and press firmly closed. This helps increase the warmth of the acetone.
• Continue the process with remaining 4 fingers.

How To Finish

1. Check the first nail. Do you see the polish getting pulled into the cotton? Regular polish will dissolve quickly. Glitter and gel polishes will take longer to dissolve.
2. Remove the clip.
3. Saturate another piece of cotton and press it on the cotton on your nail. With firm pressure, slide the cotton off from cuticle line to tip of nail. The polish should swipe right off. It’s a total game changer! I can already hear you giggling at how fast that worked.
4. Continue with remaining fingers.
5. Repeat the process on the other hand.

Why I Love This Technique

Staining

Color in polish is created with different dyes and pigments. Some polish companies use cheaper pigments that can stain the nail plate. I can also attest to using the salon brands and ending up with nails stained bright blue, purple, or pink.

When you experience yellow staining over multiple manicures, that’s because of the compounding effect of removing polish.

When this happens to me, I can see nice transparent nail growth past my cuticle line and the yellow staining deepens as the nail becomes the free edge.

In the photo to the right, you can see what I mean. See how the nail is nice and transparent near the cuticle line, but it gets more stained as it goes toward my tips?

That’s just staining from polish.

Scrubbing

When the lacquer has hardened on your nail plate, the pigments are trapped in the resins. What happens when you are scrubbing to dissolve the lacquer? Those pigments are released from the resin.

Ok, so that’s not such a big deal. We can live with that. Right?

But what are you doing when you scrub? You’re driving the pigments into the top surface layers of the nail plate.

Besides the fact that scrubbing takes a long time and sucks the oil out of your nail plate, you can see it’s just not a great option.

Warming Acetone

In Doug Schoon’s book Nail Structure and Chemistry, he says that “nail enhancements will swell and break apart more quickly if the solvent is slightly warmer than body temperature. Slightly warming product removers/solvents can significantly reduce product removal time…Warming solvents should be done with great care and caution!

Many solvents are highly flammable, including acetone and alcohol. To safely warn the solvents, place a partially filled plastic bottle containing the solvent under hot running water. Never warm solvents on a stove, in a microwave, or with an open flame.

Most salon solvents are far too flammable and may catch fire. Also loosen the cap so that pressure doesn’t build up in the bottle, causing it to crack or burst open. Finally, cover the dish and hand with a damp cloth while soaking to reduce vapors in the air.”

The takeaway from this is; don’t blow up your house! You’re risking your safety and perhaps even life when warming highly flammable solvents like acetone. It’s a hazardous task and I don’t recommend it.

So, how perfect is this Soak and Swipe ™ technique?

The clips warm the acetone and covers it to reduce vapors in the air. Yay!

Why Acetone?

Doug also says, “why do some nail technicians avoid acetone? Probably because they’ve heard untrue things about this beneficial substance. What is the truth about acetone? Acetone is one of the most important solvents in the world….Just because a chemical is absorbed through the skin doesn’t mean it must be unsafe.

In the case of acetone, it is almost impossible for dangerous amounts of acetone to penetrate the skin. Unless you soak your fingers every day in a bowl of acetone for long periods, it is very unlikely to cause serious harm or damage.” ~Nail Structure and Product Chemistry

Icy Fingers

I originally learned soaking instead of scrubbing by Deborah Lippmann. The thing I hated was how cold my fingers became.

Since acetone evaporates quicker than water, it makes your skin very cold. The process became a love/hate relationship.

When I figured out that manicure clips make polish removal incredibly fast and comfortable, I knew I needed to bring them to my Bliss Kiss™ customers.

The Solution for Gel Nail Polish Removal Too!

Manicure clips are also very helpful for those of you who love gel nails! They are easier and way quicker to apply than the traditional foil wrap method. 

1. Just make sure that you file off the shiny surface of the gel so the acetone can penetrate the gel.
2. Also, soak long enough that the gel completely slides off with the pressure of your fingers.

Do those two things and you’ll see how easily the Soak & Swipe manicure clips remove gel nail polish.

Although manufacturers’ instructions say to use an orangewood stick to push the flaked gel off, they are wrong.

Even Doug Schoon agrees with me. His electron microscope damage can be seen in his article about safe polish removal.  

In Conclusion

Nail polish removal is a necessary although annoying part of polishing our nails with gorgeously colored lacquers.

Isn’t it wonderful when knowledge and products come together to make our lives easier? Little things like this just make me happy.

I hope this helps you too.

Now, get busy and remove that polish!

The post Nail Polish Remover Tips first appeared on Nail Care Headquarters.

Are you constantly afraid of removing polish only to discover your nails are now a permanent unnatural color?

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How to reduce the potential of color staining
• How soaking, rather than scrubbing, is a better way to remove polish
• How manicure clips can help the process even more

China Glaze Blue Bells Ring

Polish Stain Removal Tips

You’ve just removed a gorgeous, dark blue and look down in horror—your nails are now a lovely shade of blue!

This recently happened to me with China Glaze Blue Bells Ring #1119.

Of course instead of panicking, I get all geeky! “Oooo, this will make a great article!”

Since I’ve read just about every nail blog post about polish stain removal, I thought I would share my insights gained by de-bluing my nails.

I’m also including the stain removing methods I don’t recommend and why they’re a bad idea.

My Steps For Preventing Polish Stains

1. In spite of using two coats of basecoat to protect my nails, expensive polishes can stain too.

2. It’s extremely critical to use my Soak and Swipe™ method of polish removal, using pure acetone, with plenty of soaking time—especially if you’re dissolving 5 to 10 layers.

3. Remove polish in ONE firm, clean stroke.

4. Remove any remaining polish with a CLEAN piece of cotton and A LOT more acetone.

5. If the nail plate looks stained a lighter shade of the color, use a clean cotton piece saturated with A LOT of acetone and keep wiping/scrubbing. Focus on wiping nail tip to proximal fold (“cuticle” line), since nail cells grow layered like house roof shingles, you want to go against the grain.

6. Use Q-tips saturated in acetone to get staining at the proximal fold curve.

7. Wash hands with warm water and soap.

8. Scrub nails top and bottom with a nail brush. Rinse. Dry.

9. Apply your favorite penetrating nail oil generously and rub it in. (Blue stains are all gone. 🙂 )

Soak & Swipe™ Polish Removal

Acetone saturation is very important key to remove polish quickly—and it’s extremely COLD! It feels like you’re soaking in ice because acetone evaporates so quickly.

This is why I recommend adding a moisturizing additive acetone or to coat your skin with a cheap kitchen oil before removing your manicure.

It blocks some of that numbing cold and prevents acetone from dissolving your precious body oil and drying out your skin.

I also love using manicure clips to hold the cotton on the nail plate. The clips trap in your body heat to warm the acetone which makes it dissolve lacquer faster.

I unroll a cotton ball and cut it into small pieces. Saturate the cotton with acetone, apply to the nail and soak for one to three minutes.

Then saturate a second piece of cotton with acetone to wipe off the first piece of cotton. This is an important step as well you help you get a firm grip to remove the polish in one, clean swipe.

Don’t use your soaking cotton to remove any remaining polish. You’ll start scrubbing. Just get a new piece of cotton.

In Desperation – Removing Immediate Stains

If your nails are still tinted after trying all of my tips, you may need to bring out the big guns….. or big goop.

Anutka at Wacky Laki has put together a great tutorial using whitening toothpaste for immediate polish stain removal.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to use this technique, but it’s nice to know it’s an option as a last resort.

No Buffing Please!

It’s surprising to me how many established nail bloggers recommend buffing the stain out—even though this is a horrible idea!

It’s quite understandable why they recommend it though.

Immediate polish stains usually are because polish pigment has settled into the top few layers of nail keratin.

This happens really easily with the traditional polish removal method—saturate a cotton ball and scrub the heck out of it until the polish is dissolved.

Nail Keratin Cells Under Electron Microscope

Even though our nails appear smooth, under an electron microscope, it’s possible to see that our nails are made up of hundreds of thousands flattened keratin cells.

As in the photo to the right, you can see the microscopic gaps between the cells.

Polish pigments are small enough to settle into those gaps with enough force.

The acetone is dissolving the colored lacquer, but your scrubbing action is driving the dissolved pigments into the top layers of keratin.

The traditional thinking is, “I’ll just buff the stain out, since it’s only in the top few layers.”

But like I addressed in my previous article about why buffing out ridges is actually making our nails weaker, the same holds true when buffing out stains.

You only have about 50 layers of keratin in your nails.

It’s a misconception that buffing a few layers won’t hurt. In truth, it only makes your nails thinner, weaker, and more prone to breaking.

Who’s Guilty?

The photo to the right by GirlyThingsBye demonstrates perfectly how scrubbing can even cause the pigment to be pushed into the top layers of our skin too!

This photo was taken after several rounds with acetone and she says it took several days for her skin to return to normal flesh color.

This is leads me to think . . . who’s the real guilty party with most polish staining?

You know that saying… “When you’re pointing at someone else, you have four fingers pointing back at you.”

Should polish brands be condemned for causing staining? Hummmmm.

Be Careful with the DIY Whitening Soaks

There a couple of other methods recommended by bloggers which I don’t recommend.

They are soaking your nails in hydrogen peroxide, lemon juice or denture remover tabs.

These techniques may work, but at what cost to the health of your nails?

One of the very worst things you can do to your nails is to soak them for 5-15 minutes in a water-based solution with some additives.

Even though our nails can soak up three times their weight in water, it’s very damaging to the keratin layers.

Where does that water go?

In between every single nail layer, slowly pushing the layers apart.

Our nails are resilient, but not for long. I explain this process in more detail here: https://www.nailcareheadquarters.com/How Water Damages Nails

In Conclusion

Hopefully, this clears up some confusion about polish stain removal.

The best method is prevention.

It starts with using two coats of a high-quality base coat and to completely dissolve the polish before using only one stroke to remove it.

The post Polish Stain Removal Tips – How to Remove Immediate Polish Stains first appeared on Nail Care Headquarters.