The stash project lives on!

Red is not necessarily red.

Here's an example:

I've been reswatching some of my reds, and several of the reds that I would have said were very traditional reds came out quite pinkish-looking - or maybe it would be more accurate to say they're magenta. Note the difference between this one - Sinful Sugar Sugar - and the fire-engine red on the swatch below that. I guess if they weren't right next to each other it wouldn't be so obvious, but still, it's a very significant difference..

Over two years ago now, when I started my big stash-photographing project, I started out with a post about red glitters, and then one called "Red is red" where I said that while all reds aren't necessarily the same, a lot of people never notice the differences. I was deliberately oversimplifying at the time but I don't think I was truly wrong about that. A lot of people will never notice the subtleties of nail polish, of any color, but do we nail junkies really care about that? For the most part, I'd say the answer is no. That's what makes us nail junkies.

(The chattering about my stash below is probably very tl;dr but I feel compelled to write it all down anyway.)

This week's Topic Tuesday topic was, show how you organize your stash. I looked at that a week ago and went, well, mine's a mess so I'm not talking about that - but I think actually that started something percolating in my brain. Those who have followed me for a long time have seen me go through multiple stash reorganizations over the years. I can't seem to quite settle on one way to do it. We live in an apartment so putting up a lot of shelving is more trouble than it is worth. I have a big collection of deep plastic containers of various sizes that I've mostly used for nail-polish storage, but I've gone back and forth between organizing my polishes by color, by brand, and even by season. I like the concept of "by season" because to a large extent that's really how I wear polish - but organizing my stash that way has been a bust. I have enough trouble remembering where I put a particular polish even using a much simpler system and the seasonal idea just made that worse. I think by brand is probably the easiest way, as far as finding things goes, but every time I've tried that I end up going back to doing it by color. And I think I'm giving up on seasons too and just going back to colors, again. It just seems to match up with how my brain works better. (And I've outgrown the collection of boxes, for the most part, so I'm going to Helmer-type drawers instead.)

So I started re-sorting polishes - I've got some really large plastic Container Store bins that I'm using for the colors I really have a lot of - and almost as soon as I started that, I started thinking about reswatching things I'd swatched before. There were a lot of bad pictures early on and then I remembered that I had a list of what needed retaking so now I'm working on both of those things more or less simultaneously. (My husband hates tripping over bins of polish, though, so that's giving me an incentive to keep working on the reorg part rather than just leaving them in the middle of the living room indefinitely.) And I'm amassing a bunch of swatch retake pictures (somehow the one above got on that list even though I had done a swatch entry for it before) but mostly those are not repeats, so I'll probably be back to posting those several days a week for the foreseeable future.

(I think it's probably not really true that I'm giving up on the seasonal concept completely. Probably what I'll end up with is a hybrid system - like, put my little collection of pastels together and you have "spring" - same with the very dark polishes for fall/winter. Then there's the very showy glitters which mostly get reserved for the holidays, the oranges and browns for the fall, and so forth. I only stick with seasonal polishes part of the time, but there are a good many that I think of that way.)