Prep your skin first. Smear Vaseline or a thick cuticle balm around your fingertips before you start with the acetone, not on the nail itself obviously, or you end up with desert hands.
After they’re off, keep the nails short for a while and oil them a lot. Don’t buff the peeling smooth though, that just thins the sad layers even more.
Read the label. If it says nourishing or with vitamin E, or lists water or oils in the ingredients, it won’t work. Those additives leave a film that blocks the acetone from getting through. Cheap drugstore remover is usually ethyl acetate with maybe 60 percent acetone, which is probably why your first attempt didn’t work.
Cut your cotton pads down so they only cover the nail, not the whole fingertip, and soak them until they drip. At the fifteen-minute mark, unwrap and push the softened gel off with a wooden cuticle stick using a rolling motion, not a scrape. Anything that resists gets rewrapped for another five minutes.
Wipe each nail with rubbing alcohol when you’re done to lift the dissolved residue. Otherwise it dries back onto the nail as a gritty film and you’ll be tempted to buff it off, which defeats the whole point.
Before you soak, get in there and look under the lifted tips. Really look. Green or dark spots, redness, warmth, swelling, throbbing, or any weird smell. If you see any of that, don’t glue them down or cover them again. It could be trapped moisture or irritation. Either way, better to have a pro or a doctor take a look before you pile more product on top of it.
Save your money for now.
Do you know what she actually used underneath the tips? If she built any structure or an apex with builder gel, or put on a rubber base first, that layer could be a hard gel that acetone won’t touch no matter how pure the bottle is. You’d be buying something that won’t even work.
Just text her. Most techs will tell you exactly what’s on your nails even if they can’t squeeze you in for a fill.
Plenty of salons will do a straight soak-off for fifteen or twenty bucks. It’s cheaper than a failed DIY and way cheaper than dealing with ten thinned-out nails afterward.