10 Reasons Why You Need To Swatch Your Entire Nail Polish Collection

Do you own more than 20 nail polishes? If you’re reading this post, it’s quite likely! You’ll know that managing a large nail polish collection is quite difficult sometimes. You can’t find the shade you need or forgot exactly what colours you own. Well, I know how it feels. If you’re following me on Snapchat or Insta you’ll have seen my mission to end this nail polish chaos and organise my collection once and for all.

I’ve got the nail polish storage under control but finding the right colours is my main problem. That’s why I decided to swatch my entire collection on nail tips. Having about 2,000 nail polishes in the office with new nail colours arriving weekly, swatching them all became quite a mission. However, it was worth it! There’s been so many benefits that I wonder why I didn’t do it earlier.

So whether your collection is 20 or 200 polishes, here’s 10 great reasons you need to swatch them all right away:

Organisation: organise your nail swatches by brand and/or by colour. Later it will be easy to find the right colour and it’s location in your stash.
Quality Control & Money Saving: while doing the swatches, you’ll see how different the quality of different brands is. Some are faster drying, others are more pigmented and some are just so terrible, you feel sad you bought them (see #8 for this case). You’ll be able to identify the best performing brand and focus on it rather than spending your hard earned dollars on some mediocre polishes. For instance, I was really impressed with Inglot O2, Dior, Kester Black and Isadora compared to most of the brands these were a real treat to swatch.
Easy Search: you’ll be able to find the colour you’re looking for so quickly!
Untrieds Management: once you swatch all the untrieds on nail tips, they are technically not untrieds anymore. Even more so because… well, read the next one!
Colour Selection & Comparison: having all your polishes swatched on sticks you’ll be able to ‘try’ the nail colour without having to paint your nails with it. A nail stick placed over your natural nail give a pretty good idea on how this colour will look on you. For nail techs, having nail colour swatches handy helps clients to pick the colour more easily.
Nail Art Inspiration: it’s so much easier to come up with new colour combinations when you can simply put a few sticks together. You see what works best right away! Plus, you can use nail tips to practice new nail art techniques and for perfecting your line work.
Dupe Management: you’ll quickly identify all dupes in your collection and the colours that you have way too many (blue and purple in my case) and that you may should stop buying for a while (money saving, yay!)
Accounting: you’ll be able to count them all (finally!). The nail tips I’m using come in packs of 50, so it’s much easier to count the colours in packs of 50 then individually per bottle.
Space Invaders Management: part with dupes, also get rid of the polishes that you’ve not used/tried for the last two years and the bad quality ones. Space is precious, you better clear it/save it for something more exciting!
Therapy: painting on nail swatches is as relaxing and satisfying as painting nails. Plus, having your entire collection swatched and under control will instantly make you feel better, more organised and more responsible. Like someone said (or maybe it was just me), first you take control of your nail polish collection and then control of your life!

Now, over to you!

How do you manage your nail polish collection? Do you swatch your polishes on nail tips? And if so, have you found some interesting benefits for doing it that we could add to the list?

Share in the comments below, I’d love to know…

– Maria, xx