Color Coded Nail Polish Drawer

I have a slight obsession with putting things in color order, and when I go to a salon, it makes me giddy to stand in front of the display shelves with all of the bottles of nail polish lined up and looking pretty. But at home, I store my nail polish in a drawer where all I could see were the tops of the bottles. While my nail polish collection is not that large, I still found it frustrating to be constantly lifting bottles out of the drawer searching for the color I wanted. 

I wanted to label each bottle to make it quick and easy to find the right color. I originally thought about using a cotton swab to paint a dot on the top of each of my bottles, but it turns out that nail polish doesn’t stick well to the lids. Stickers were the obvious next choice. Some of my bottles already had stickers on the top that identified the color name, so I peeled off these labels and re-stuck them to the sides of the bottles.

To create colored label my nail polish bottles, I wanted to use supplies I already had around the house. I grabbed a sheet of mailing labels from my home office and painted a large dot of each polish color on to the white mailing labels.

Some of the colors required painting a second coat in order to get a good, solid color. As I continued to paint a dot of each color, I kept the bottles lined up in the same order so that I didn’t get the colors mixed up.

After the nail polish was dry, I used a hole punch to cut out a circle of each polish color.

Then I simply stuck each sticker to the lid of the corresponding bottle.

Once all of my polish bottles were labeled, I arranged them in color order – which makes my OCD-side oooohhh so happy!!

Labeling my nail polish bottles was such a quick and easy organizing project, but it makes such a huge difference!  It’s so much easier now to  find what I am looking for without having to lift out each bottle.  It’s also helpful because often times nail polish colors look different dry than they do in the bottle, so these little labels allow me to see the true colors. The only two bottles that I didn’t label are the ones that contain my clear top coats – and the lack of labels now make these bottles easy to spot as well.

I have always stored my nail polish in a plastic bin within a bathroom drawer, all the while wishing I had the space to store them on cute display shelves where I could see all the colors at a glance. Now I feel like I have the best of both worlds! My newly labeled bottles allow me to quickly see all of my colors, and it’s also convenient to be able to lift the container out of the drawer and take all of my polish with me if I want to use it in another room.

Of course, I have other nail care supplies that I store in this drawer, including files and clippers, as well as nail polish remover. Next week I’ll be over at Pretty Well Organized sharing some tips for organizing toiletries in bathroom drawers, and I’ll be revealing the rest of my nail care drawer at that time, so be sure to check it out!