Buying habits and bottle size

I just noticed that Colores de Carol, in addition to having a really lovely and colorful new blog header, has a new tagline - " 'I have enough nail polishes' - said no woman ever." Very cute and apropos.

In fact, I said that very thing last summer, although obviously I wasn't serious about it, because I then proceeded to double the size of my nail polish collection in six months. Actually maybe what I said was that I didn't think I really needed any more, in the sense that I had all the major color groups covered. Only then I decided I needed this polish and that one, and somehow it snowballed. Need is a very fluid thing.

I am contemplating this partly because somewhere in my recent orgy of clearance-sale purchases, I hit 300 polishes, according to my spreadsheet. Last spring/early-summer, when I was doing that first set of stash photos, I know I said I had 100-odd full bottles, plus a bunch of minis. A lot of the things I bought in the interim have been minis, and I'm not going to try to figure out the mini-to-full-size ratio,** but anyway, I was under 200 total when I made the spreadsheet back then, and now I'm over 300. So a lot of buying has gone on. (I did get the dozen China Glazes for free, yes. And I did some swapping with Karen, who is a very generous swap-buddy and I definitely got back more bottles than I sent her. But I paid for all the rest of 'em.)

Which is to say that I need to slow down. I'm trying not to say the words "no-buy" out loud, because I tried that last summer and it didn't go well. I should've known, really. (Try to tell me I *can't* do something, and it rarely ends well.) But I think some slowing down should be doable, hopefully.

**It's becoming relatively meaningless, I think, in any case. The concept of a full-size bottle being 0.5oz/15ml seems to be going by the wayside. However, minis just seem to get smaller - I bought some minis lately that were 4ml, or about .13 oz. It's enough for a couple of manis, I imagine, but boy, that's tiny. I'm trying to at least start paying more attention to how much I'm buying as well as what I'm buying, but it's easy to get seduced by the pretty colors and the glitter and forget to look!


So remember how I said I sorted my polishes by brand, then after I took the pictures, I was re-sorting by color? Well, here's what that looks like:

Basically I commandeered every big plastic bowl that we have in the house, and most of my polishes are just sitting in those. I still have a few more pictures to take, then I can start breaking this down and resorting within these rough categories, too. The purples (top picture) are in a big purple bowl meant for Halloween candy; then the middle picture is sort of fall-colors-plus-red-plus-gold, and that's in a bowl with a Christmas design, and the blues and greens are in a big green plastic bowl that I think is Tupperware, and was probably one of my mother's. (This is not everything, as you might can tell, especially since pink is notably absent - this was just the pictures I snapped because I thought it was all slightly comical.) (Also I am slightly proud of my bowl-to-polish color coordination!)