When the kids and I quarantined ourselves 11 days ago, my husband continued to go to work. He’s a Sales Manager at the biggest Chevy dealership in town, and for whatever reason, car dealerships are considered necessary during a pandemic.

First of all, who the hell is out buying cars right now? You do not need a new car. You need to stay at home like the rest of us who want this horrible self-isolation thing to end ASAP so we can get back to regular life. No, I’m not wallowing in self pity at all, shut up and mind your own business.

Robbie says he is thankful that he still has a job, because people are being laid off right and left. The rational side of me is thankful, too. The irrational side, which sometimes finds me eating chocolate icing directly from the container while I cry on the floor of my closet, is royally pissed.

When it sunk in that nail salons, hair salons, and other such things were closing up shop for an unknown period of time, my first thought was oh shit, my roots, immediately followed by oh shit, my nails.

If you’ve never had dip nails before, allow me to explain. I’ve been a nail and cuticle biter for as long as I can remember. Gel manicures tend to last two days at the most, and any attempt to do my own nails produces a result that looks a lot like that of my children.

My therapist was the one who told me to try dip nails. After the first time I did it last summer, I was hooked. It didn’t matter what I put my hands through, the manicure looked amazing. It’s like concrete, so there’s no way to pull it or peel it off — awesome, right? Except when there’s a pandemic. Then it isn’t awesome at all.

Reader, please join me as I embark on a journey into the unfamiliar territory of do-it-yourself tutorials. I hope you’re excited, because I can hardly contain myself.

You might be wondering why my face looks a little … off. Well friends, I realized several hours too late that I’d only filled in one of my eyebrows. If that doesn’t sum up my entire existence at the moment, I don’t know what does.

The materials I used in the removal process are as follows:

1. 100% pure acetone
2. Aluminum foil
3. Heavy-duty nail file
4. Cotton balls
5. Glass bowl

This situation reminds me a lot of the time I decided I could give myself a bikini wax at home: arrogant and misguided.

I told myself that surely I could do the removal just like they do in the nail salon, which was a lie, of course. I’ve already explained to you that I’m not even capable of painting my nails decently, so I think we all know how this is going to end.

Here are the steps:

1. File off the top layer of each nail
2. Soak a cotton ball in acetone
3. Put cotton on top of fingernail and,
4. Wrap with aluminum foil.

My right hand was easy because I’m left handed. I really struggled to do my left hand, so my kids stepped in to help. I’ll let you guess how that went. After realizing this wasn’t quite going according to plan, I ended up taking all the foil wads off my fingers and sticking my fingers into a bowl full of acetone.

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I soaked until I could no longer feel the tips of my fingers, then pulled my hands out of the bowl and used a rough paper towel to wipe off the melted dip goo.

Repeat eleventy hundred times, and you get this:

After cutting my nails and filing the remainder of the dip off (that’s a lie, I totally gave up on filing and decided to just live with it until it grows out), I found a cheerful shade of polish that adequately covered the black spots that I still have on my fingers.

So, yeah. I’m pretty anxious to be released from isolation/social distancing so I can once again let the professionals work their magic, but until then, I’ll be sharing the wonders of DOING IT YOURSELF DURING A PANDEMIC!

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