Julep Maven Nail Polish Remover Wipes Review

Hey everyone! So in my unboxings of the January Boho Glam and American Beauty boxes, I mentioned that I had tried out the Nail Polish remover pad sent in each box. If you would like to read either of those unboxings, here are the links for the American Beauty unboxing and the Boho Glam unboxing.

If you're not sure what this whole Julep Maven program is, here's a link to my post detailing the program. If you would like to go sign up, or check it out, here's the link for the Julep Website!

I think this product is a sample product, still in testing, but I wanted to try it out and document that process for you all. Looking at the package, it really reminds me of those little handi napkins that they give out at rib places, KFC and anywhere that serves messy food items. It's a basic white square metal package that you tear open.

One thing that I thought was interesting was that these are very obviously test samples that Julep is giving out. They don't have their own name printed on the package yet because I imagine they have been sent different incarnations, and this is the latest that they are trying. The Julep label is literally just a sticky label stuck on top of the regular label for this product. I was curious, so I peeled it off to see. I also looked up the company, and not surprisingly, they make those sanitary wipes, along with just about every other baby wipe type product too. the packaging is just a generic one that has their name on it along with the instructions. That's all very industry standard, but it just interests me. Most every product is made by a company that specializes in formulating an item (in this case pre-moistend wipes,) and then they contract out to a company that would like to make their own version of that product, specific to their own needs. Definitely not anything negative to me, just interesting to see it confirmed.

Okay, so opening the package was simple. You just tear off the side, and get out the nail polish remover soaked wipe. The thing I found odd was that I kept wanting to unfold it to make it bigger, but it wouldn't do it! I don't know if that was just me, but I would have liked it to have another unfolding to it. This version was just really small. Part of that might be that it has to maintain that thickness to have enough scrubbing power, but it seemed like they could have made it twice as large and still had it fit in the package. In this photo you can see the size of the wipe.

On my nails I had one coat of Julep Basecoat, one coat of Julep Sienna, and then I stamped nail art on with one of Juleps blue colors. I'd worn it for about a week at this point and was wanting to switch it out for a new color anyways, so this seemed like a good chance to test out the product. Since my manicure was a week old, it was chipped on the edges a bit. So I took the wipe and proceeded to scrub my thumbnail with it. I noticed that the stamped layer came off really easily and right away. The gold layer was a little harder to remove. Most of it came off, but the middle portion took a little more pressure. Then I moved on to my index finger and was able to remove that as well. On to my middle finger and I got the stamped layer off just fine, and then about half of the gold...and nothing. It just would not work any more. I used up both sides for two nails. Here is a photo of my hand showing what I was able to remove with the wipes on my fingers. My thumb basically looked just like the one finger that was completely polish free.

Truthfully, I am pretty disappointed with these wipes. They seemed like such a cool idea for traveling, but I think I would have better luck just presoaking some cotton balls in my nail polish remover from Sally's, and putting that into a container to travel with. For me, the main problems are that: the remover just was not strong enough to take off a reasonable amount of polish, the wipe size was really small, and I felt like it just was not effective enough to warrant buying it in the future. I also felt like the package was pretty boring! It's too easy to confuse it with a handi napkin when they're both white. I would prefer it to be a bright color, or something that at least looks like it's beauty related! As it stands, it would be good to use if you're into nail stamping and need something to take off stamp art without ruining the base coat. These wipes could also be good for cleaning up your fingers after a manicure. I really hope they fix the flaws with this product, because it has potential. It just didn't work well enough for me. I would love to read about other peoples experiences using these! Please let me know if you or your friends have any. Thanks so much for reading!