Put it on, Take it off

I thought I'd show you my interpretation of the "foil method" as discussed on various blogs and message boards.

I wonder who the genius was who figured this out? I want to thank this person! Thank you!!!

The old method: saturate a cotton ball in polish remover, hold it on the nail, remove nail polish. Voila!
Fairly straightforward, no?
Well, no. Not when you layer glitter and other fancy top coats onto your nails. It makes nail polish removal quite the chore. When I first started adding glitters, removal was 30 solid minutes. I timed it one day as I stood in the bathroom working on what I thought was a quick "ooh! I'll just zip this polish in a few minutes!!"
Nope. A solid 30 minutes, and I think that it was longer, I was probably overcome with fumes and blacked out some of that time.

New method: put remover on piece of cloth (something not dissolved by acetone, I've found polyester and cotton work fine, anything that is acetate might have a problem), place little pieces of foil....wait. I've got photos...let me explain...

So I've got my six ounce bottle of Cutex acetone (long since refilled with other acetone) along with my foil pieces and precut cloth squares. (I've also got glycerine in the bottle, it's a big help to the skin)
In my version, I have small nail-sized squares of cotton cloth. My foil is reused many, many times.

Then I take a cloth, pump some remover into the well, wet the cloth, and fit it over my nail. This was the Diamond Cosmetic's Froggy jelly green. I loathed removing it, I kind of love this polish!
Notice how the cloth is still opaque (the cloth here is an old tshirt rag that has seen better days. Seeya!)

Then I cover the whole thing up with foil.
The foil here has been folded into about 3-4 sheets.
Foil is easy to reuse this way: 1) as metal is bent it becomes stiffer, cracks appear 2) the extra layers prevent vapor leakage. It does, however take a while before the cracks appear. This is only my second set of foils, and I've been doing foil for about 6 months. Not bad.

I do one hand at a time.
Now, THIS is the genius of the foil method: acetone is chemically shaped so the molecules don't want to stay together as much as, in contrast, water. They are only held together with forces that are weak. Unlike water, which is held together with hydrogen bonds (a bulk of our bodies are held together with hydrogen bonds), acetone molecules want to piss off into the atmosphere. This is why they are called volatile. The foil keeps the molecules, which would be almost equally happy being a gas as being a liquid (water, as a comparison, really enjoys being a liquid), from evaporating away, and drives them back down into the polish and further assists with it's dissolving of the nail polish! (Plus, it's less smelly with the foil)
Neat-o!

What about wait time?
Good question!
I find that a few minutes ranging from 2-4, depending on what you've got on your nails, works. If it's glitter in many layers, maybe longer. I have even found I might have to do another dose. I also find that the wetter the cloth with acetone, the better the removal.
In this photo you can see now the polish has soaked into the cloth.

After I remove the foil and see the cloth is soaked I just push it up and off.
Here you can see either I didn't have enough acetone, didn't leave it long enough, or there was too much stuff on my nails.
You can leave it longer, re-wet the cloth or put a new one one. It depends. If it's all gunky, I just start over, if there's a little left, I just take some cloth and clean it up.

There! All gone! And no slop in the cuticles. Before, when I had difficult polish to remove, my cuticles were always full of hard-to-remove nail polish. I'd literally have old polish growing up out of the nail beds. Ugh! It was bad.

A little extra clean up is all it takes to tidy up the old fingernails and you are ready to go onto the next polish!

Here's the results of the removal and some clean up. It's a very small amount of cloth. There isn't a need for a huge amount, either, because the polish is so soaked into the cloths that it just slides off.
Many people use felt, but I haven't used it much, just some remnants. I am all for using what is already a rag or an item that is on the verge of already going into land fill. That's just me.
I think, from what I've read, felt can be less expensive than cotton balls.

Here are my little foils stacked up and ready to go for the next job. Sort of my Nail Polish Removal SWAT Team. The foil is what does the job, the cloth can be anything that doesn't dissolve in the remover.

Remember: acetone is a happy molecule that will just party as a gas or a liquid, foil keeps him at the party he was invited to (your nail polish), not the one he wants to go to (the air you breath!)


Last note: some people like to wrap their whole finger with the foil, but as long as the wet cloth is covered, it will be fine, it will not evaporate. The more folding and bending, the sooner the aluminum foil will harden and crack (the metal gets brittle and don't have that same malleability, that's why jewelers heat metals after they've hammered them for a while)

Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. I hope that it helps explain a method that I am grateful for the invention of, and I hope the person who came up with it appreciates my variation.

Thanks for reading my little nail polish journal!