How I organize my swatches

I have nothing to disclose.

I'm still not quite feeling back to my regular normal yet, so today I thought I'd share something different with you all. I've been using nail wheels for about a year now, and I just recently decided to switch to nail sticks so I wanted to talk a little bit about those.

I absolutely loved my nail wheels when I first got them - in part because I discovered that I just absolutely love painting nail swatches. I could do it all day long. I loved the wheels, because all of my colors were right there together where I could look at them and compare them. This worked absolutely wonderfully. At first.

 This worked pretty well. At first.

This is how I first organized my wheels. I separated my polishes by similar colors, then painted like colors on wheels. So I had 2 wheels for reds, pinks, 1 wheel for blacks, whites, etc. You get the idea. This worked absolutely perfectly. Until I got more polish, and I ran out of room on my wheels.

 We have chaos!!!!

That's when I let chaos happen and I just randomly started swatching all of my new polishes on the same wheel. It's kind of nice, because now I have a visual record of the order in which I got my polishes. But this also means that the colors are absolutely completely out of order which makes it almost impossible to look for dupes... or to find a particular color, for that matter.

Here's some more things about the wheels I don't like:
- they take up a lot of space
- there isn't much room to actually write on them, so I used key codes to track my polishes, and used a separate notebook to keep track of everything. This was a major pain.

This is where I'm keeping some of my wheels for now. This is my swatch wheels only, I've already stored away my old practise wheels. See? Takes up a lot of space.

I still love my wheels for practising on, but for actually swatching my polishes on, I've decided to switch to nail sticks. Hopefully this will go much better. There's already a few things I don't like about the sticks. First is the cost. I have 400+ polishes now so I easily spent $20+ just on little pieces of plastic, but hey that's my fault. The sticks I got come on little screws with a bolt on the end. I actually kind of like this, except I've found the sticks are kind of hard to attach to the screw. It's a little bit tricky. I know some people use keychains, but the screw seems easier to me.

 This is better... so far.

Also, I didn't look at one of my sticks well enough before painting it, and I found when I went to put it on the screw that the end was bent horribly. It won't be going on the screw, it'll be going in the trash and I'll have to make another one of that polish, darn it!

The sticks do have some benefits:
- take up less room
- easier to organize so it's easier to keep them by color, finish, etc.
- easier to compare polishes
- lots of room to write on!

I bought a bunch of these, just waiting for them to get to me. I'm probably going to organize them by color, so they will be much better organized than my wheels! :)

What do you use to keep track of your swatches? Let me know & thanks for reading!