Boyfriend picked out my nail polish.

Boyfriend picked out my nail polish. Now let's see if I still got my nail art skills.

Between last night and today...

Between last night and today I swatched all of my burnishing powders that are used with gel polish. I swatched them over both black and white polish because they look dramatically different depending on the base over which you put them. I have ~50 powders, so x 2 colors, that's ~100 swatches. 😳

This wasn't a huge "need to get it done" type of task, but I rarely use my powders because I didn't have an easy way to see what they would look like. The powders usually come in little pots with an eye-shadow type brush to apply them, and those two things usually come in a small bag so they stay together. At one point I'd starting swatching them on an old nail wheel and snapping off the nails to go in the bag, but the bags weren't always clear and the nails would sometimes be turned around where you couldn't see them. And if I ever wanted to take the nails out to compare one powder to another, there was always the risk of getting things mixed up. It just wasn't effective.

You would think that in the years I've been messing with nail polish that somewhere along the way I'd have finally started using swatch sticks with labels, and you'd be wrong. That is a thing I started doing literally YESTERDAY. But it makes so much sense and it's so much easier to compare colors without worrying about getting things mixed up. I'd love to eventually swatch my whole nail polish collection, but that's not a task I'll be starting anytime soon. 😅

Anyway, this is my drawer of powders, and my swatches over both black and white, with and without flash. Now that that's all organized and lovely and satisfying I have no reason not to use my powders and I'm pretty excited about that.

This is the state of my nail stuff currently:

This is the state of my nail stuff currently:

The stack of drawers to the left contains things like files, gel tools, fake nails for swatching, magnets for the polish, different kinds of tape for nail art, brushes, etc.

The 12 helmers in the middle contain my polish. I have 3 empty drawers at the moment, and that is with all of my polish in there. My polish is a mess; it's sorted into drawers by color, with things like magnetic and multichrome and topper polishes (mostly) separated. The drawers are just in there every which way at the moment. I do plan to re-sort by color and arrange the drawers better, but it's a process since I have the physical storage of my polish to contend with as well as the digital storage for my database (swatches, color descriptions, collection, event, release date, which drawer it's in, etc). According to my database, I have a little over 4,200 polishes.

On the right, those drawers contain things like my gel lamp, my chemicals, my stones, studs, and other small embellishments, as well as powders (the kind you buff into gel), my hard gels, and my stamping polish.

Not pictured:  My binders of stamping plates and my binder of decals, vinyls, and stickers.