It's a situation every at-home nail painter has been in. It's time to remove your toenail polish for one reason or another — perhaps it's chipped and faded, maybe you're just ready for a new color, or you're feeling like going polish-free for a while — but your manicure is still welcome to stay. How can you remove your pedi polish without messing up your mani polish? Cotton balls and rounds are too risky to touch directly once they've absorbed remover. Cotton swabs would take forever. And those remover pots with the polish-saturated foam aren't exactly ergonomic for foot use. If you happen to have disposable gloves, great! But if you don't, a TikTok video currently going viral has a hack that puts to brilliant use another common household item: a tampon.

A TikTok user that goes by @ag380gtmgmt usually gets a few thousand views on her videos, but one she posted in late April has been viewed more than a million times — because it's just so why-didn't-I-think-of-that. 

"I'm about to show y'all a life hack — with one of these," she says, holding up a tampon with a purple plastic applicator in her manicured hand. "Pour you some nail polish remover in the lid here and soak it up," she explains as she dips the cotton tip of the tampon into the liquid-filled Cutex bottle cap. "You can take your nail polish off without messing up your fingernails."

She rubs the tip of the tampon over her big toenail, erasing the polish — but only on her toenails because the plastic applicator acts as both a handle and a guard!

It's so simple, yet so smart, and yet another reminder that TikTok is actually useful sometimes.

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