Organizing

You're going to laugh at me.

Earlier in the summer, there was a meme going around of different nail artists and polish designers showing their workspace and how they store their polishes. This was interesting, but I did not take part, since my collection wasn't large enough at the time to merit organizing, fitting neatly into a drawer of my jewelry armoire. This week, however, I acquired a few new polishes, and they didn't fit in the drawer, so I had to come up with alternate space.

This is the part where you can laugh. My oversized collection of 34 bottles of every-day use polish (with a couple of topcoats thrown in) fits into a shoebox.

With my stamping supplies.

And doesn't even fill it:

That's a far cry from the 100-200 bottles I've heard some people mention. I like polish, and I try to make sure that I have every color represented, but I avoid anything that might be a duplicate, I don't like most shimmer polishes, and I'm super picky about my glitters, since they harken back to the chipped manicures of middle school students for me. The shoestring is short, so each polish I own occupies a specific place, filling a certain role. I frequently mix polishes to get the desired color or effect. I have to--there's no sense in buying a bottle of grey polish when I'll only use it once in a blue moon, if that. I'm not a fan or orange, so a single bottle of orange polish is all I need. I have one bottle of yellow for doing flower centers and certain effects, and don't wear it otherwise because on the whole, yellow is one of the worst colors for me to wear, along with most shades of green.

One change that I did make was to pick up some sticky labels from the grocery store and swatch each color on it. Most of my bottles have very similar tops, so being able to spot the color right away makes things much easier.

At some point, I will get around to decorating the box, or perhaps switch to a more sturdy, plastic version. Eventually, I imagine that my supplies with necessitate a second box. But for now, a single shoebox that lives under the jewelry armoire is fine by me. I'm pretty easy to please.