Anyone who has ever used glitter nail polish and then tried to remove it knows it’s not easy. The smartest thing you could do is to start by using a peel-off base coat, but if you are like me, you don’t have that on hand. I know those beauty gurus say it’s a good practice, but I just don’t.
Sorry but I’m just not that organized. Don’t ask me how I can own ten different bottles of glitter nail polish and no peel-off base coat, but it’s true.
The Soak The Polish Method
So if you are like me, you go searching for hacks to remove glitter nail polish with ease. The first hack told me to soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover and then leave it on my nail for a few minutes. This honestly didn’t work well for me. It took me several swipes to fully remove the glitter nail polish from my nails, and to be honest, it’s not really that much of a life hack. It’s just using nail polish remover. I mean, how is that even a “hack?”
The Tin Foil Method
The enhanced version of this life hack is to soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover, put it on your nail, then cover the nail in tin foil. This method is really just a way to help keep the cotton ball soaked in nail polish remover on your nails.
Covering your nails in foil doesn’t do anything special – other than helping to hold the cotton ball soaked in nail polish remover in place better than without the foils. But as I said before, that alone just didn’t work for me. Using the tin foil to hold the cotton ball in place does help, and to me, it made all the difference in the world. It also allowed me to use way more nail polish remover than I did previously so that I got a real good saturation of the polish remover.
The Paint Over Method
Next, I tried what is called “the nail polish trick.” Basically, this lifehack instructs you to take a bottle of some random nail polish and paint over your currently glitter-painted nails. Just pick any random polish and literally just put a single coat on your nails. A thin layer of any polish will work.
Then take a cotton ball soaked in nail polish remover, press down really hard, and wipe it off. I can’t explain how it works, but it does. My glitter polish was gone. I can’t even believe it actually worked. But it did, and now it’s my go-to method to remove glitter nail polish.
Now, if you are going to be all responsible and put on a peel-off base coat, you might want to watch this video from Simply Nailogical to find out what the best peel-off base coat is. She tested out 8 of them and did a side-by-side comparison during a total of 32 different tests.
But again, for those who don’t have a peel-off base coat on hand, consider using the nail hack I mentioned earlier and just paint a coat over your current coat, then use a well-soaked cotton ball, and you’re good to go.