Soy Nail Polish Remover by Karma Naturals

I have a picture heavy, lengthy post for you today, but I think you'll find it informative.  I've been wanting to try soybean oil based, nail polish remover for a while, but I can't find it stores and its a bit expensive.  I finally bit the dust and ordered some from Amazon.com for about $12 for 4 oz., with $3.99 domestic US shipping.

In a nutshell, it works well.

I'll show you the bottle first, then the details.  You can click the photos to enlarge them.

There's no acetone, it comes in a dark amber, glass bottle.  In case you can't see the ingredients, they are propylene carbonate, soybean oil methyl ester, and tocopheryl acetate.  Karma Naturals offers three varieties to choose from, unscented, lavender, and tea tree.  The one I have is lavender, and it smells like lavender.

I tried to stick my nose over the top, which your not supposed to do, by the way, but it seems to smell faintly like linseed oil.  Overall, I would say this is low odor and there is no chemical fumes.  It smells nothing like acetone.  After removed my nail polish, left the room for a little while and came back, there was no odor left.

Now, the removal process.
Here are my nails, polished, after two days of wear.  This is Barielle's Elle's Spell.  A jelly with mylar flakies.

I took a cotton ball and unraveled it so that it is a long strip, like in the first photo.  I saturated just the end of the strip with remover.  That dime size amount was able to remove 2.5 fingers worth of polish.  The first time I used this soy based remover I saturated the whole cotton ball and it was way too much remover.  

I just held the cotton ball over my nail for 5 seconds, and the polish started to come off.

See the stubborn flakies? I had to scrub a little to get those off.  It was like removing glitter, which I haven't tried yet.  It wasn't that laborious though.

So this is how much cotton I used after removing polish from all ten fingers!  Only five dime sized amount of remover and half the size of one jumbo cotton ball is all it took to do both hands.  Impressive.  I normally use two full sized, saturated cotton balls and a q-tip when I use acetone based remover.  So less product, less waste.  Waste not, want not, is the saying, right?

Here are my nails after remover.  The solution is greasy, not like cooking oil though.  I would say the consistency is a cross between cuticle oil and dry oil.

Up close you can see the soy based remover did a pretty good job.  There's no residual pigment left over and there isn't any pigments stuck in my cuticles or in the crevices of my skin.  I did not have to use a q-tip with acetone to clean up after removal, like I normally do.
















Above is my left hand after a good washing with soap and water.  Yes, I broke a nail the other day, after lifting something heavy... same nail from a few weeks ago!  Anyhow, YOU MUST WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER USING SOY POLISH REMOVER.  Do I need to say that?  I always wash my hands after using acetone too, but you never know what people's habits are.  The REASON BEING is that if you touch any painted object, like painted or polished furniture, while your hands are still greasy the paint will come off right on to your hands.  This stuff is strong.

Here's a video of someone using Karma Naturals on glitter polish.  It's a bit long so you might want to skip around.  Her demo starts 5 minutes into the video, if your impatient like me you can fast forward.  She shares some good information but you have to listen to the whole video and put up with some babbling.  Sorry, but overall its a good video.




Priti of NYC makes a soy polish remover as well, but that's about $20 for 4 oz.

I am definitely going to add this to my routine, its nice not having to use acetone all the time.  I'll do an update when I get the opportunity to remove a hard core glitter mani.

Has anyone else tired this?

UPDATE:  I found a better way of using this remover is to coat all 10 nails some remover before starting to remove polish from the first nail.  The lady in the video uses this technique and its better than holding the cotton ball on the nail for 5 seconds.

I plan on doing a review on the unscented and tea tree varieties as well.  Stay tuned!