Gelish Manicure: Undone

I decided to remove the gelish finger nails on Tuesday and replace them with some patriotic nail art instead.

Here is how you remove gelish nails:

Method 1: Soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover, hold it on your nail, then wrap the whole thing in foil and wait ten minutes.  I did it this way over the weekend to remove a troublesome peeling thumb nail.  Works well, though I can't imagine doing all ten fingers this way.  Once you foiled one hand, you would never have the dexterity left to foil the other hand... right?  (Umm... yes, I realize I probably put way too much foil on that finger, but whatever).

Method 2:  I bought these nifty finger wraps that look sort of like bandaids - they have a pad that you soak in nail polish remover and the wrappy part is made out of that medical tape material that doesn't stick to anything but itself.  These worked well, and I was able to do both hands at one time, so I think it was worth the expense.  The only down side is that it didn't soak the tips of my nails very well and I ended up having to scrape the polish off those parts.  I think this may be operator error.  Next time I will wrap them over the tips more.  If if still have the problem, I may need to to resort to doing one hand at a time with the foil method.

So, after I removed the nails, I did a coat of the gelish foundation and two coats of the top coat, with no color in between.  This gave me a really good foundation for my nail art, featured below.

I'm taking the flags off tonight and I will paint them a different color, but this shouldn't effect the gelish foundation underneath.  I'm curious to see how long it will last??  (And will I leave it on long enough to find out, or will I redo everything once again??)