You beauty! Maybelline Express Remover

So you had a glamorous harlot red manicure. Two weeks ago. And it’s looking a bit daggy. There’s a slice of naked grow-out at the nail bed echoed by a raggedy half-moon of slutty chips around the tip. But you’re putting off the palaver of the scrub ’n’ strip process: piles of bloodied cotton-wool balls — unless, of course, you’ve run out, in which case it’s piles of bloodied scraps of loo paper or kitchen roll. And you scrub and rub and worry away at your nails and cuticles to get rid of the polish until your entire finger is stained red in an unshiftable kind of a way and your cuticles are squawking at you. And, just for good measure, you find you’ve managed to drop a wodge of pink remover-and-polish-soaked something on the sofa and sat on it. So the sofa is now blessed with a permanent pink blob. No wonder you put it off.

But here is Maybelline Express Remover, an incredibly obliging pot that saves you from the aforementioned ordeal. It contains a cylinder of sponge soaked in acetone-free nail varnish remover, so it won’t dry out your talons or the surrounding skin. Two dips and twists per nail and it completely removes a base coat, two coats of colour and a top coat with no slivers of varnish nestling in the crevices. Under a minute for both hands, I’d say. A revelation.

Maybelline Express Remover, £4.99, at