Nail Polish Organization: Swatch Sticks

Hello my lovelies! Today's post is something a bit different, but I hope at least some of you will enjoy this type of post. I'm gonna talk about how I organize my nail polishes. Well, not how I organize the bottles themselves, I have a whole video showing you my pretty red Helmer (link here), but my way of keeping my whole color palette together so I can pick and compare my polishes. A few other bloggers have done posts about these and they have called them swatch sticks. 

In the picture above you can see all my swatch sticks together and grouped by color. I used to swatch all my polishes on swatch wheels and it was a good option when my collection was small. But after I reached the 200 polish mark, the wheels were getting quite chaotic. This is how over 250 polishes look on swatch wheels. 

Quite pretty, right? Well imagine trying to keep all these together in a stack. They would all fly from my hands and all over the room. Not to mention the fact that I had to look for colors on a few different wheels when I wanted to compare or match them. I made my wheels in the order I got the polishes, so they were all crazy rainbows. Not to mention there is no space to write the names of the polishes. After a while it's impossible to remember all there is on there and you have to check the spreadsheet to see what each number is. My collection was growing and something had to be done! And that's when the swatch sticks stepped in. 

I got my swatch sticks from eBay. They come in sets of 50 in a little ziplock bag along with a long screw that you can use to arrange the sticks on. The price is between 2 and 3 $ for a set, so I would say it's quite convenient. I tried finding bigger sets but I couldn't. So I ordered 7 sets because my collection was already at 300 and I needed a bit of space to expand. 

You can see above how the sticks look. They are made of clear plastic, so you can paint over or under the "nail". I painted mine under the curve of the "nail", so the polishes look like they would have top coat on. If I wanna see the original finish of the polish, I can just look underneath. There's plenty of space to write the name of the polish on the stick. 

Most people printed out little tags, but you can also write the names using a marker if you want. I went for the printed tag version because I already had most of my polishes typed up in my spreadsheet. I won't go into detail about tag dimensions or anything like that because mine were pretty random and they aren't all the same length. I didn't have a lot of patience to cut 300 tags so some of them are crooked. What I do want to mention is that I used sheets of self adhesive paper to print them out, so after cutting them I just slapped them on without using anything else. Another option is to use scotch tape or something similar to stick the tags on. 

I organized my swatch sticks by color and I separated holos, duochromes and glitters from the rest. Since I had 7 screws and didn't use all of my sticks, I had some space to expand and some of the collections are smaller than others. I do plan on finding a better grouping option, I know some people use rings but I haven't found those here yet. I photographed all of my swatch sticks so you can take a look if you are interested. 

neutrals (white, black, grey, silver, gold, nude, brown), yellow and orange

red, pink and purple

blue

light blue, teal and turquoise

green

holos, duochromes and layering shimmers

glitters

My favorite part about this organizing method is the fact that I have all my layering polishes together, so if I want to spice up a manicure I can easily pick out something. I prefer to have them like that and not separate some colors that I have less of. I hope this post was informative for you and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask me in the comments. I will try to answer as best as I can!