Organizing the Nail Polish Mess

Lawdy, I’m addicted to nail polish. In one weekend alone, I managed to blow my entire beauty budget for the month on only nail polish.
It’s not my fault.
Sephora put its entire OPI line on sale for $4.50.
I bought this beauty from Julep for only $35 during their Friends & Family sale.

I do like to clean everything out, like my closet and makeup bins, a few times a year. However I just hadn’t gotten around to going through my nail polish for a long time, I’m think it’s been at least a year. The picture above is actually what my polish bin looked like before I got started on this weekend’s clean-out project. This is not the way to store polish and I’m ashamed of myself. It was well beyond time to clean out.

To start off, I separate all polishes by age. If it’s over a year old, it goes to the left. If it’s been within the past year, it goes to the right.

Just because a polish is over a year old doesn’t mean it’s going away.

Same for the newer polishes, just because you may be new doesn’t mean you get an automatic in.

The reason I separate them by age is to help weed out the deadwood quicker. Amongst the older polishes are those that have dried up, separated, and have started to go bad. It also helps make it easier for me to determine what polishes I haven’t used in a long time. Going through the older pile only takes me a few minutes. There’s about 10-15 polishes in the older set that I use very often (NARS Purple Rain, OPI on Collins Ave.) so they went over to the new polish pile. In short, if it’s in the older polish pile, chances are very high that it’s going away.

The new polish pile takes me a long time to go through. Even though I’ve been trying to cut back on dupes, I still end up with a bunch. I then have to stop what I’m doing, do some swatches, and determine which polish I want to keep. After that’s done I go through more of the newer polishes and think about if I really want to keep them. My mom had gotten me a bunch of the polishes from OPI’s Spider Man collection last year that I haven’t worn yet because the colors really aren’t me. I decided to go ahead and keep them but I’m not sure if they’ll make the next polish cut. The old polish pile probably took me ten minutes to go through. The new polish pile took me over an hour of swatching and some rather deep thinking about polish that I’m a bit ashamed to admit to.

I will go anywhere without wearing a bit of makeup, but I hate not having my nails painted.

When I had gone through all the polishes, I organized the smaller polish bottles in a box I found lying around and put the polishes back in their bin. All neat and clean!

If you’re planning to clean out your polishes, here are a few tips:

• Separated polish is usually still good, it just needs a good shaking & rolling between your palms.
  If it doesn’t mix back together in a few minutes it’s gone bad.
• If a polish to be thicker or thinner than you remember it may be going bad.
• If a polish’s smell has changed, it’s gone bad.
• Store polish upright, ignore what you see on Pinterest.
• If you’re afraid to throw a polish out, hide it in your closet or dresser for a few months. If you haven’t gone looking for it, get rid of it.
• Polish is best kept away from heat and sunlight. Keep it out of your bathroom!
• Shake your polishes every so often. I’ll shake my bottles as I’m trying to decide on a color.