Nail Polish Journal

Nail Polish Notebook.

Nail polish is easy to collect. Maybe a bit TOO easy. A bottle or two here and there. Once you start keeping an eye out for it you'll find bottles popping up everywhere. Drug stores, grocery stores, beauty supply stores...well ok, that last one is a bit obvious  But drugstore bottles tend to be cheap so its not that hard to justify picking up a couple when you happen to be in the area. How often you "happen to be in the area" is what you need to justify :) Anyway if you start to collect, one day it will happen. You find that gorgeous glitter you can't live without only to get home and find you already have it or one by another brand identical to it. You could return it, but some stores put up a stink about returns. You could keep it, most of us do. But how to avoid the problem in the first place? You can't very well bring your whole collection with you everywhere...can you?

You can with a Nail Polish Journal. Take a peek into mine after the jump.




Well at the moment I have just over 300 bottles and to keep track of them I've written a polish journal. Small enough to keep it in my purse, but with enough pages to support my habit for a while. If you have a large collection already, starting a journal might seem a daunting prospect, but I find it has been invaluable to me. Out with friends and stumble across a nail sale? See a new color and not sure if you have it already? Pull out the journal and look it up! My book is organized by color "chapters".

Page one of Greens Chapter. I now know that "Irish Green"
is a jelly. I didn't know what a jelly was when I first wrote that.

I find that is the easiest way to search through it to compare polishes I find "in the wild", but if you want to organize it by brand feel free. It's your book. On the first page of each chapter I have a paper clip in a corresponding color to easily flip to the right section.

My Chapters.

I like to do a small write up on each polish. Nothing super in depth, just what kind of polish it is, how well it applies, any problems or benefits of it, that sort of thing. 2-4 polishes per page works best for the size notebook I've chosen. You could do one per page, but that eats up a lot of pages and I need room to grow.

One page of my Glitters. I like to do multiple coats to get an idea for coverage.

Reds and Pinks Chapter.

Other than the basic color spectrum (Roy G. Biv) consider adding chapters for Black &White (I include Greys too), Glitters, Nudes & Naturals (shades of Brown), and a miscellaneous chapter for some polishes that just don't fit anywhere else. In my book I also keep a stamping chapter to browse my plates, and a chapter for doodling ideas, testing color combos and just generally playing.

Stamping Chapter consists of all the images on one plate and the plate's name.

Doodling.