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!

Dupe it up!

I have nothing to disclose

One of the new things I want to do with my blog this year is start comparing some of my polishes for dupes. I'll try to make this a weekly thing or near to. I was trying to think of what to call this feature, and the Violent Femmes song "Add It Up" popped in my head... so Dupe It Up, it shall be!

Since Valentine's Day is coming up before too much longer, I decided to start with some of my red polishes. Today, I'll be starting with an ancient polish of mine, L'oreal Sangria, a generic polish, elf Medium Red, Sally Hansen Hard As Nails #58 Red Hot and finally Chrome Girl Love Note.

 Please pardon the mess. I'll do a real manicure in a bit, this is just for fun so I wasn't worried about being messy :P
From left to right: Chrome Girl, Sally Hansen, elf, generic, L'Oreal on the thumb.

Each of this is kind of a medium dark red. Love Note comes out immediately as being different than the others, because like most Chrome Girl polishes I've used before, it's pretty much a 1 coater and it's just a bit darker. The others are all pretty sheer. Red Hot is definitely NOT a dupe because it has a really nice red shimmer to it which I didn't notice at first.  Sangria has just a bit of sparkle to it, not enough to make it a Red Hot dupe, but definitely enough to make it stand out on it's own.

That just leaves my generic polish, and the elf polish. They're pretty darn close in color and application. I did notice some clumping with the elf polish, and it stains pretty bad!

Since I'm testing for dupes, and red is such a pain when it comes to staining, I just did a quick clean up and left some of the staining so you can see how bad some of these are. I was quite happy with the Chrome Girl polish, and very happy that it didn't stain nearly as badly as the last red one I used by them.

So by now you might be asking why I'm bothering with this in the first place. By now I have a ton of polish 400+, and I'm pretty sure there must be some dupes in there some where. I'd like to weed out some of the polishes I don't like, and some possible dupes and maybe have a blog sale eventually just to get rid of some of the extras. We'll see!

Next I'm going to do a manicure with just one of these polishes. I wanted to match this up with one of the polishes I got from my friend Narmai, so I decided Chrome Girl Love Note would work best. This is one coat.

This post kind of makes me not like red on me.. just because it tends to stain so much and I can never clean up well enough to get rid of all of it. Maybe that's why I rarely wear red? :/

So anyway, then here it is topped with my polish from Narmai. This polish seems to be kind of generic so I'm not even sure what to call it.. no information about it whatsoever on the bottle! It's a clear base black glitter which kind of make a textured effect, but it also has a ton of tiny tiny red sparkly glitters in it, which ends up being really pretty.

I used Jior Couture top coat on all of the fingers except the accent, for that I used my Chrome Girl matte top coat. This looked pretty matted, too!

I really like this glitter because it's kind of unique.. it's really quite pretty.

What do you think? Think I have some dupes?


(I'll try to make less of a mess with my next Dupe it up! sorry about that :P)