An old Topic Tuesday: total polishes

I saw this in somebody's YouTube videos, and I somehow missed it before (I think it was maybe back in February), and that was how many polishes do you own, total? I can answer this pretty easily because I have a spreadsheet for all my polishes that I maintain pretty obsessively. And let's see, the answer at the moment is 619 regular-size bottles and 95 minis, so that's a grand total of:

714

I knew I was hovering around 700, so that's not any more than I expected. Note that I saw this topic on the title of a video, but I did not watch anybody else's videos yet so I don't have a handle on what numbers the YouTube people were coming up with. I suspect that they mostly are higher than that unless they've done a lot of destashing. (But destashing was a huge trend on YT nail channels last year so it may be smaller for some people than I'm guessing.) However, I think I can say pretty confidently that my 714 is a number larger than a lot of people's, in general, and way smaller than others.

When I started keeping the spreadsheet - maybe four or five years ago - I was at a couple of hundred, so my collection has grown a lot - and I got there mostly without buying entire collections. Normally I pick and choose - Dollish Ultimate Fandom is the only thing where I ever ordered a full set, and that was minis. (I have a full set of China Glaze polishes from one holiday season, but I got that in a blog giveaway.) It's like being a picky eater - I'm also a picky orderer. It's really rare for me to buy more than a couple of polishes at a time out of a collection.

Note that the reason I said 714 was the answer "at the moment" is that my birthday is coming up, and there's stuff here (in this very room where I'm sitting) that's meant to be part of my birthday present and so I know it's here but I haven't opened it yet - and thus it's not on the spreadsheet yet, either. My husband will get me some kind of a surprise present, he always does, but for the most part I pick out and order myself whatever I'm most wanting when my birthday is coming up. In practice, this works out, because while it means most of my gift is not a surprise, it also means get what I want and I release myself from feeling terribly guilty about however much money I spent. I haven't looked, so I'm not sure how many polishes are over there - I think maybe 9 or 10 polishes and some other stuff that is not polish. I know there's a Clinique gift in there plus whatever Clinique purchase I made to get the gift, and there's a Boxycharm box, and Zoyas from the Earth Day promo, and a second round of Starrilys. (I'm also due to get a Pretty Serious preorder that was delayed, and I got a notice that that will finally be along in the next week or so - whether that will be in time for my birthday or not doesn't really matter. I've forgotten what's in there exactly but I believe it's another four or five polishes at least.)


(For the record, this week's actual topic is your most expensive polish. I'm pretty sure mine is a Lynnderella that I paid a little over $20 for.)


I don't have a display rack or a storage system that's very photogenic, so I'm not going to attempt to post pictures of the whole thing. However, here are some pieces of my stash.

Part of my Zoyas:

These are actually pretty recent - all of my purples sorted into a box:

and greens: