the nightmare that is known as gel polish removal

I know I thought gel nail polish was the best thing since sliced bread the other day, but boy, have I changed my mind.  Actually I guess I think the polish is pretty great, but when one wants to remove it, it's a nightmare. On Saturday, I thought I'd use my regular nail polish remover pads, but they didn't put a dent in this polish.  No matter how much I scrubbed and scraped, there was not even a trace of red on the remover pad.

I googled removal of "gel nail polish removal" and apparently there's a lot of discussion on this topic as there were "About 2,290,000 results".  That's a lot of people trying to figure out how to get this stuff off their nails.

Yesterday I bought the necessaries - cotton balls and acetone remover - and this morning pulled out the aluminum foil to begin this treatment.

Step one:  soak cotton in acetone, stick on fingernail, and wrap in aluminum foil.  Wait 10 minutes.

(I'm 100% sure that my fingers would not look as messy as this had I had the removal done in a salon, but pretty good for a home job, right?)

Step two:  remove the foil and cotton ball and peel off the polish.

Houston, we have a problem.  The polish did not peel off.  I must not have strong enough acetone remover.  So I decided to repeat step one.  Except this time I used bigger pieces of cotton balls and more tin foil.

Repeat step two:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS POLISH?  WHY WON'T IT GET OFF OF MY NAILS?

I did a shortened version of steps one and two, again, and this is the best I got.

And now my fingernails feel horrible.  I think they've had an acetone overdose, along with excessive scraping.  So now I've got to go buy a buffer to try to smooth them down and give them a little shine. Then I've got to file them down short to get rid of the red on that one nail that will not be removed otherwise.

Note to self:  no more gel nail polish.  Unless I'm going to a major fancy 'do and need my nails to look good for longer than it takes me to leave the salon and put the key in my ignition and ruin the normal manicure.  Then I'll get gel polish.  But only then.