I change my nail polish as often as I change my clothes. Okay – not that often, but I still do my nails more often than the average person.  When it comes to taking my polish off, the cotton balls can add up.  Until I learned a neat little trick to use only ONE cotton ball each time I take my polish off. Don’t believe me? Read on. 

Cut the strips of cotton into ten nail-sized pieces.  You’ll be laying each of these pieces on your nails and the nail polish remover will do all the work, not you or the cotton. So keep the pieces of cotton to the size of your nails.  You should have a little bit of extra cotton after cutting ten pieces, so hold onto that – we’ll be cleaning up with it at the end.

Lightly dip a piece of cotton into your nail polish remover and place it over your nail. Press it down and leave it there while you repeat this step to cover each of your nails with a nail polish remover-soaked piece of cotton. Once all your nails are covered, wait about one minute.

After a minute, go back to the first nail you started on.  Press down on the piece of cotton on your nail and push the cotton off your finger. Your polish will come off in one swipe! You can see in the last image at the right that the entire design I had on my nails came off in one piece – the design is still visible!  Repeat this step on each of your nails.

Take the extra bit of cotton you had at the end, soak it in polish, and use this remove any little bits of nail polish that are left on your nails.  I typically only have a little bit left around my cuticles.

Ta-da! Simple, quick, and easy.  This trick doesn’t work perfectly for glitter polish, but it does help a bit. I’m still on the hunt for the easiest way to take off glitter polish, so if anyone knows a trick, fill me in! Until then, I’ll keep using my one cotton ball trick to take my polish off.