How I test polish

Good evening,

I'm still sitting here more or less in a state of shock after my last post. Between that, and my nail mail today, I'm just astounded. To me, spending $5 or $10 or sometimes even $1 on myself seems wasteful. To look at how much I've saved over the past two months, I'm just amazed. I know there's many coupon clippers, samplers, etc. who will have put me to shame, but for someone who rarely buys anything other than necessities, I think I did pretty good. Anyway, moving on...

Before I share my nail & sample mail with you, I wanted to share with you how I test out my polishes. I had planned on doing an actual manicure today, but I didn't get my polish in the mail which I was expecting today, so I'm having to put it off another day. So instead, here's some of my testing methods.

My toes! (Please excuse me for using my ugly, hairy ol' feet!)

As you can see, I have lots of different colors on my toes, including the two new polishes I've received so far this week. You can also see I am very sloppy! :b I swear I don't mean to be, it just kinda happens!

This method of testing polishes works perfectly if no one ever sees your feet. I can paint each toe nail a different color or combination. When I get a new polish, I can test it over the colors I have on my toes just to see how it plays out.

The other method I use is swatching on old glass jars. Yes, plain old washed spaghetti sauce jars.

This method works pretty well, actually. You just have to take into consideration nails are not clear! So far, the colors seem to have turned out pretty accurate to how they look on the nails. You can see in one jar I stuck a piece of printer paper inside to help with the opacity. I haven't actually done this yet, but cleanup should be pretty easy. My boyfriend assured me I could probably just scratch off the old polish with a razor. I could scratch off some of it with my finger nail, so I believe him. I kind of like keeping my jars as is though, just for a reference to all my different colors and the color combinations I've tried out :)

So that's two of the ways I've tried out my polishes. When I did the Black Leopard nails, I practiced on a piece of white cardboard first, in addition to trying out on the glass jar first. I think this works pretty well if you're just looking to practice on something without having to worry about taking photos of your samples or if you don't want to spend the money on a.. I forget what they're called? The nail polish swatch wheels? I'm sure you've seen them in other blogs.

Let me know what you use to practice, if you've found another cheap alternative! I always love to see what other people are doing :)