nail polish remover – Sophia Ravenna

After the fail that was the e.l.f. nail polish remover pads, I decided I’d try Julep’s offering. I figured since it’s a higher-quality company, they’d be better, and since they were individually wrapped, they wouldn’t dry out, and maybe I would finally have the perfect travel nail polish remover solution.

You can get a 10-pack of these Clean Slate Polish Remover Pads for $14, or $11.20 if you’re a Julep Maven. That’s a bit expensive per each, but it would be worthwhile to bring on long trips to change my polish on the go. Each pad is a decent-sized rectangle of decently thick material infused with nail polish remover. You’re supposed to apply to the nail, let it soak for a couple seconds and then wipe it off. How did it go?

Yeah, I’m not very impressed. The pad seemed to dissolve the top coat, because it left my nails looking dull, but it barely removed any color, let alone the fine glitter in my polish — which, by the way, is a Julep color, so they should play nice! It started out feeling moist but quickly dried out. I figured, maybe it’s just a dud so I broke out another one…

The second one started off strong but only got through two and a half nails before drying out. I thought about seeing how many pads it would take to clean off all 10 nails, but honestly, I’ve got better things to do today!

Speaking of better things to do…

Inspired by monthly makeup photo challenges but not quite up to 31 days of makeup every day, my friends Becka Bomb, Mandy and I worked together to come up with a fun 10 day belly dance makeup challenge! Each day we’ll each do our own interpretation of the day’s challenge — and you’re welcome to play along, too! We’ll officially start on Monday, July 11th. If you can’t start on Monday, you can either hop on in the middle and play along for the duration, or choose your own start date and complete all 10 days. Just make sure you tag it #everydayisgigday so we can all see it! Let me know if you have any questions about the themes!

PS: Don’t forget that if you love my blog, you can help me out by contributing to my Patreon!

If you know me, you know that I have a love-hate relationship with glitter nail polish. I love to wear it but hate to remove it! Sure, I found that the Glitter Off base coat makes it easy to remove, but I also found that it was so easy to remove that sometimes I’d just knock all the polish off of a nail while going about my day. So when I saw this Instant Nail Polish Remover for Glitter in Sephora, I had to pick it up!

This is one of those removers where you dip your fingers in and there’s a little wet sponge that removes the polish. However, this one also has a scrubby sponge, so the idea is you soak your nails, wipe most of it off with the regular sponge and then scrub any stubborn glitter or nail art with the coarse sponge. Clever!

I decided to test this remover against my usual Formula X remover, to see how they compared in terms of glitter removal. My first test subject was “Cher” by Julep, which has a generous amount of fine glitter in it

First I removed all the polish from my right hand using the Instant remover, then I used my now-naked right hand to use a cotton ball soaked in Formula X to take on my left nails. The results were that both nails had a slight green stain (I really need a better base coat), my right hand had a bit of color left on the underside of the nail but no glitter, and my left hand had a couple of spots where Formula X refused to remove some especially stubborn nail polish, but the rest of the nails were free of glitter. The instant remover seemed to work a little quicker/more easily but both got the job done while leaving a couple areas that needed touched-up.

But how would they compare on chunky glitter? I’ll admit, I had to really dig through my nail polish stash to even find a chunky glitter because I’ve really been avoiding them lately, and along the way I had to stop and clean out some, oh, 15 year old nail polishes that I’m never going to wear again. But I finally found a nice Orly polish with a mix of fine and chunky glitter and applied two coats to the middle finger of each hand and let them dry before repeating my experiment, although this time I spaced out and reversed which hand I tested which product on.

Once again, I found that both products actually removed all the glitter, although it took some elbow grease on each one. I had to really utilize the scrubber sponge on the Instant remover, although I see that on the product listing they say to let it soak for 10 seconds, which I did not do because the package just says dip and scrub. And the traditional remover, of course, resulted in the usual shredded cotton ball. So the Instant nail polish remover for glitter was a little faster and easier, but both products got the job done.

Both removers deposited leftover glitter on my fingers!

I feel like whether or not you buy this product will depend on how often you wear really glittery polish. The product does what it promises, but is it worth having a second bottle of product floating around my already cluttered bathroom? I’ll probably continue to use it until it runs out, but then go back to just scrubbing the glitter off with Formula X and cotton balls, or using the Glitter Off base coat and resolving myself to only having sparkly nails for one or two days. But if you love glitter nail polish and wear it on a regular basis, you might want to keep this on hand.