Nail Polish - the First Decluttering

Here is the story of how I started decluttering my precious nail paint collection - which wasn't nearly as big as some others I've seen, but it was too big for my new minimalist self!

Last year I've decluttered a lot of my things, but the nail polishes remained untouched. I would only throw some away if they were dried out and beyond restoration. Then one day I decided I didn't need to have every single color of nail polish, as I don't like all of them and some don't really suit me. (Though it sure was nice being able to do all the different manicures for the blog.) I remember I actually went out and bought some orange nail polish for the 30 days challenge, because I didn't have any. :)

So, for the purpose of this decluttering session I put all my polish in a bin. I don't normally store them this way. In fact, seeing polish stored this way makes me a little sick. :D But here it is.



For some of them, I needed to remind myself of the color, thickness, sheerness and all that, so I took samples on a piece of paper.



Then I set aside all the ones that used to give me an unpleasant surprise by not turning out the same color as the bottle, the ones that were near duplicates or duplicates of a better version I had, and the ones that never suited me in the first place and I bought them just because I thought I needed to have ALL THE COLORS:



On the other side, these were the ones I kept:



And finally, all the normal polishes fit into my bigger stairs-shelf thingy, while the special effect polishes fit nicely in the smaller stand on the left:



This ended up looking much nicer than before, when I had to find creative ways to stuff them all in there. Still, it kept bugging me because they were ordered by color and didn't look very neat, with so many brands all mixed up.

Then there came part 2 of the decluttering! (In the next post!)