Tutorial: A Different Clean-Up Option for your Manis!

Helloo readers! Happy friday! Thanks to the lovely ladies who wished boyfriend a happy birthday, he was mighty excited about having some more polished crazies sending him birthday lurve :D.

Today I have a little something different. I've never done a tutorial and I cannot even pretend I know what I'm doing, but I gave it a shot anyway. Usually people mention the holy grail of cleanup on manicures to be a brush and acetone and, while this is def going to give you the cleanest cuticle line, sometimes polish can seep into your cuticles or be extra stubborn and you need a little more force to remove it. That's where this comes in handy.

This could get kind of long so I'll place most of it under the jump and hope you follow me there :D

What you'll need:

• Acetone 
• Cotton Balls 
• Orangewood Stick 
• Little cup to pour acetone in (optional) 

Nobody really asked me to do this and I never really thought of doing it because I thought it's one of those things that everyone knows about and does so it wouldn't be worth it. Then I talked to Ms. Nailpocalypse herself that I realized maybe one person can find it useful and one person is more than enough for me. The rest of you can ignore this I guess :P. I took a ton of pictures to try to better explain this so bear with me.

The gist of this is to cover the orangewood stick with a bit from the cotton ball and it makes it into a skinnier Q-tip. I use this a lot to clean up under my nails when removing polish (you'll see in the pics) and when I do something messier like stamping, watermarbling, splatter, whatever. I prefer this to just using a Q-tip because I always bump my Q-tip into my polish and ruin nails so I prefer the control I get with this method.

What you do is just dip your stick (hehe...hehe) into the acetone and then sort of align it with the cotton ball and twirl it around to coat it in cotton. You can do a thicker covering or more sparse depending what you need. When you pull away the cotton breaks up and you'll end up with something like this:

Lol, I love that picture for some reason. It looks hairy. Anyway, then you just twirl the stick in between your fingers and you'll get this: 

Easy peasy right? Then you just wet the stick (hehe...) in the acetone again and you're set to clean! Like I said, I like cleaning up under my nails with this. This is what I mean:

Beware the fuzzies!

 I get polish under my nails a lot, depending how messy I am when I wrap my tips. Either way, this is extremely useful for me in a lot of situations. For example, you can scrub more when you stamp with a shimmery polish with the stick vs. the brush to remove the leftover shimmer left around.

I'm sorry if this is something so commonplace that it is useless, but hopefully someone can enjoy or get some use out of this. If not then at least I have one more nail art post to show you later on :D

Is this something you already knew about or is it new to you? Do you have any other tips to share?

Have a good weekend and don't dehydrate with the heat!