I knew I wanted to build something.
I just didn't know what.
I'd been telling people for months I wanted to start something. I just didn't have the thing. Turns out you can't force that part — it finds you when you've stopped looking for it.
The short version: I was in a park with my mum, picking at my gel extensions because they were lifting at the edge and the salon felt too far away that day. Small, annoying, completely unremarkable moment. Nothing cinematic about it.
But it stuck with me for the wrong reason. Not because removal was hard that one day — because I realised it's hard every day, for a lot of people, and nobody had actually fixed it properly.
Nail extensions are a whole process. But the future is press-ons. The one thing standing in the way? The glue.
The most unglamorous, unsexy, underdog part of the entire process. Nobody puts it in a reel.
It decides whether someone comes back to press-ons again or gives up and goes back to a salon chair out of frustration.
Soak in warm water and hope. Wait twenty minutes and hope. Nobody had an actual solution. Just patience.
And I looked, properly. YouTube, Instagram, Reddit threads, plain Google searches at odd hours — everywhere I looked, the answer was some version of "soak and hope." Soak in warm water and hope. Wait twenty minutes and hope. Nobody had an actual solution. So I started cold-calling manufacturers. I sounded, genuinely, a little unhinged. Explaining a product that didn't exist yet, to people who make things that already do, with an enthusiasm that did not match how little I actually knew.
Alongside that, I went and checked what was already out there. Most existing removers fell into one of two buckets — brands with zero transparency, no INCI list anywhere to be found, or brands that were transparent and the ingredient list was genuinely alarming once you understood what you were reading. Neither felt right to put on someone's hands, over and over, every week.
I won't pretend I can walk you through the formulation science, because I still don't fully have the vocabulary for it. What I can tell you is it took a lot of rounds — back and forth, adjusting, testing, going back again — with people patient enough to explain things to someone who very obviously had no formal background in any of this.
Before I built anything final, though, I did the thing that actually mattered most: I asked.
I went to nail artists, people already living this problem daily, and asked what they'd want, what they'd tried, what had failed them before. That's genuinely where the "pro" in Protip comes from — pros, with their tips, telling me what they actually needed.
Consider this whole thing your protip, from a lot of people's protips first.
Respecting the Art
Somewhere in all that asking around, something else started bothering me. When people talk about beauty, they mean skin. Hair. Makeup. But nails? Nails are done religiously. Almost nobody talks about it with any real reverence. Not the art, not the hours, not the actual people doing it.
I started paying closer attention to the artists themselves once I was deep in this — the amount of skill it takes to hand-paint a full set, the patience, the sheer repetition of getting one tiny canvas right over and over, client after client, day after day, mostly unpaid attention for work that's genuinely, technically difficult. That felt like something worth building around, not just alongside.
Some of these sets take hours. The detail, the embellishments, the hand-painted work — that's too precious to treat as disposable collateral in the removal process. I needed something that respected that as much as it respected the nail bed underneath it. A genuine win-win, not a compromise dressed up as one.
So this was never going to be only a product for me. It's meant to be a community of what I've started calling "nail-minded" people — the artists, the obsessives, the ones who've had a specific opinion about coffin versus almond since they were fourteen. People who take this as seriously as it deserves, even when the rest of the beauty conversation doesn't.
Disconnect & Protip
And here's the actual question that kept nagging at me through all of it — why is it a trade-off at all? Cute nails or healthy nails. Wear the set you love or protect your actual nail bed. Anyone who's genuinely obsessed with getting their nails done knows exactly what I mean. You pick one, quietly, every time, and just live with what you gave up.
Not anymore, though. Rotate every set you own. All day, every day, however often you want. Disconnect's got you either way.
The name Disconnect is exactly what it sounds like — it's built to disconnect the bond between your nail bed and your press-on, cleanly, without taking a layer of your actual nail down with it. But if I'm honest, I also liked that it works as more than a chemistry description. Disconnect from the appointment you don't have time for. From the remover that dries your hands out. From doing this the hard way just because that's how it's always been done.
And Protip — beyond the actual nail tip it's named after — is meant to be bigger than one product eventually. There'll be more products, more hacks, more of us just figuring things out loudly and sharing it as we go, built alongside the people already doing this work, not around them.
If I'm being fully honest, I didn't set out to build a brand. I just needed this one specific thing to actually work. Everything else is what happened because it did.
If you try it — and I really hope you do — tell me. Genuinely. What worked, what didn't, whether you felt a difference. This isn't a finished story yet. It's still being figured out, and I'd rather have you in the real, unfinished version of it than a polished one that isn't true.
With a lot of chaos and some genuinely good chemistry,