The Great Nail Polish Stash Organization Project (What I’ve Been Up To)!

Hi everyone! I suppose I’ve been away from blogging for a while…oops…I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to leave my blog alone for this long! Things just got really busy for me, and blogging kind of fell by the wayside. If you’ve been checking my Instagram, you can probably tell that I wasn’t doing nothing all this time. Somehow, though, I didn’t have quite enough energy to post everything on my blog. To make up for it, I’ve prepared a whopping 5 posts that will come out in the next few days, so you readers have something to look forward to!

Anyways, I thought I’d update you on my progress with my New Year’s Resolutions, specifically the first one: destash! My goal is to get rid of 100 bottles of nail polish by the end of March, and I’m well on my way there with over 60 bottles in my destash box already. While deciding which bottles to get rid of, I realized that I’m beyond the point where I can rely on my memory to tell me what I have, and I should probably develop a system of cataloging my stash so that I can prevent getting lots of dupes. After thinking about it for a little while, I’ve figured out how I want to get organized, and I’m making progress!

I want to catalog my stash both visually and digitally, so I decided to organize in two ways. First, I decided to invest in some swatch sticks, which I bought on Amazon for not all that much. With swatch sticks, it will be easy to see what I already have, and to cross-compare between different polishes without having to remember what I’m looking for and then dig it out. This is definitely going to make my subscription box posts WAY easier! I got a bunch of clear plastic swatch sticks that look pretty average. A lot of people in the reviews were saying that it’s a good idea to paint the undersides of the swatch sticks so that the polish is protected, so I did that instead of painting the top. Once the polish was dry on each stick, I wrote the name of the polish along the length of the stick. Here’s the first swatch stick I painted:

So cool, amirite?

I then bought a bunch of 3.5″ loose binder rings to hold all the swatch sticks together, while still allowing for the possibility of more swatch sticks in the future. I put together the OPI Nordic Collection swatches this way:

 

Yay! Now, I plan to put 50 swatch sticks on each ring, so this particular one is a little sparse. I guess I’ll just have to keep going!

While painting the swatch sticks, I decided that making a polish database would be a good idea. As I swatch the polishes, I can add them to the database until I’m done. I made a rudimentary database in Excel that contains information about the brand, polish name, color, and finish of each polish, plus a short description and mention of any known dupes. At the time I put in the OPI Nordic Collection, this is what it looked like:

I modified things a little since then, but it’s basically the same. By the end of this process, I should have a good idea of how many bottles of nail polish I have, and can also get some neat info on the most popular brands, colors, finishes, etc. in my collection.

I am soooooooo excited to continue this project! Organizing my stuff always makes me feel great, and, moreover, I will have a good idea of what I have to avoid dupe-ing myself over and over again. Once I finish the project, I’ll write another post giving you all an idea of how it turned out in the end 🙂

Just for funsies, I’m putting a poll down here to see if you readers can guess what the most popular color in my stash will be once I finish organizing! After cataloging around 10-20% of my stash, I’ve narrowed it down to what I think the top three colors will be, so pick the one you think will win:

I hope you’ve liked my post! Like I said, I’m really sorry I haven’t been blogging as much recently. Things have been busy, and I haven’t had a whole lot of time or energy for blogging. But you can absolutely look forward to the plethora of posts this week for sure! Stay tuned, and thanks for reading 🙂

– Emi