A Better Way to Remove Nail Polish

Usually I leave my nail polish on until it is so cracked and chipped I just can't take it anymore and want to remove it as fast as possible! Recently, though, I've been reading about how using nail polish remover in a wiping, rubbing - or, worse, scrubbing - motion is pretty bad for your nails and therefore not the recommended way to get the job done. I can corroborate this - my nails are usually pretty strong, but I have notice weird peeling of the top layers after particularly vigorous polish removal. So I decided to try a different way.

I read somewhere - probably in a magazine (kind of a throw-back but I love to read magazines in the bath and other non-iPad appropriate places) -  that the best thing to do is wet a cotton ball with nail polish remover, place it on your nail and wrap a thin strip of aluminium foil around it, let it sit for ten or so minutes, and then remove the foil and cotton balls - and of course all the polish with them.

I've already written about my resistance to following directions when it comes to my digits, so obviously I did not do just that. Here is what I did do:

i. Materials:

one cotton pad, cut into six even pieces
rubber bands*
nail polish remover

ii. Procedure:

1. Wet five pieces of the cotton pad with nail polish remover.
2a. Place each of the pieces on the nails on one hand.
2a. Secure with a rubber band. (So, right after I did this, I realized that securing something to your finger tips with a rubber band hurts! So I pretty much took them off right away - of course I took pictures first, though. *If you choose to follow this method, you probably want to leave the rubber bands out. Since the pads were wet and nail polish remover kind of sticks to nail polish, they stayed on well even with nothing holding them in place.)

Do not do this. It hurts.

3. Wait the length of an Icona Pop song.
4. Remove cotton pads (and most of the polish!).

Something that I like about this procedure is that you use way fewer cotton pads this way! Whereas before I'd usually use at least one pad per hand, now I could just...

5. Place each of the pieces of cotton on the nails of the other hand, opposite side facing the nail as previously was.
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4.

This is the "reuse" step in reduce-reuse-recycle.

One Icona Pop song is actually not long enough to remove all of the polish, so what I did was...

7. Use the sixth pad and some of the unused corners of the other five for cleaning up any lingering polish.

Results of the experiment.

iii. Findings:

This method takes a bit more patience, but it feels a lot better on my nails than the (sc)rubbing method.
Next time, I will definitely not use rubber bands.
Next time, I will try to wait the length of two Icona Pop songs per hand.

All in all, I was pleased with the experiment! I will definitely be using this method again.

Do you guys all already do this? Am I behind the curve and/or unusually impatient about removing nail polish?