11 Pedicure Tools for Under 10 Dollars

When it comes to picking a nail polish remover, the important thing is to go for a low-acetone or no-acetone product whenever possible. Acetone dries out your nails and is a pretty serious chemical, besides. Just about any non-acetone nail polish remover will do, but we like Cutex's super-cheap price: Under $2.50 on most sites and at most stores.

Cotton pads are easier to use, because they don't shred as easily, but they're also more expensive. You can find a giant bag of cotton balls for as cheap as $1 online. If you do decide to go the cotton pad route, we recommend hitting your local drugstore. For whatever reason, pads seem to be much cheaper when you buy them in a brick and mortar store.

For years, we bought those 99-cent toenail clippers from the drugstore, only to have them fly spectacularly apart during hangnail emergencies. Learn from our mistakes. Tweezerman clippers cost a little bit more, but you'll have them forever. Plus, there's probably no real way to assign a dollar value to avoiding clipper-part shrapnel. These cost under $5.

When you're doing an at-home manicure, regular old emery boards are sufficient. When you're doing a pedicure, on the other hand, you need a serious file, both to sand down rough nail edges and to clean out the grody underneath parts. Revlon makes a great all-purpose nail file for about $8.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need cuticle nippers at all. In reality, well, sometimes there's no other way to get rid of those little hangnails. Still, we can't recommend highly enough a good cuticle cream and a few seconds of cuticle maintenance. The less you use the nippers, the less you'll need to use them. Under $10.

You can use pretty much any stick-like implement to push back your cuticles. (Some nail technicians will even tell you just to push back your cuticles by hand in the shower.) But we like this curved cuticle pusher, because it gets all those little scrungy parts around the nail bed. Under $10.

A pumice stone is one of the cheapest and most effective beauty tools out there. Our pick is well under $2. (Don't love pumice stones? The Ped Egg is a good alternative, especially for people who find pumice stones hard to grip.)

There are tons of great budget foot scrubs out there, but Avon once again wins the cheapest product spot with its FootWorks Smoothing Foot Scrub. It's only 99 cents! That's cheaper than going out to your kitchen and rubbing actual brown sugar all over your feet.

All hail the mighty Burt's Bees, maker of some of our favorite budget beauty products. Their coconut foot creme is awesome, as usual. It smells and feels great and costs under $7.

You can just as easily use cotton balls, but for home pedicure kit completists, there are plenty of good toe separator products on the market, some for as low as $3.

Some things are worth spending a little bit more money on, and nail polish is one of those things, especially for a pedicure, where you don't really want to have to switch out your polish every other day. OPI nail polish is a dollar or two more expensive than some of the very cheapest drugstore brands, but its longevity and range of hues justifies the expense. Also, you can sometimes find pretty good deals out there: We found OPI polish on sale for $2.