One thing in my beauty routine that has been sadly lacking is the wearing of nail polish. Miss Butterfly has a ton of nail polishes, and I added to that collection a bit at the end of last year. I had full intentions of wearing nail polish more often at that point, but it didn’t really happen. I know why too, I am not great at sitting still doing nothing with my hands, and so am often uninspired to sit down and do my nails.

But, I also like the look of polish on, and it helps me keep my nail-biting in check during stressful work times. Seriously, if my nails are painted, I take so much better care of them!

So, then I thought about project panning, and how much I enjoy that process. And how much I enjoy watching others go through that process. I figured I could do the same with nail polish, as a way to motivate me to sit down and paint my nails regularly. I also realized I’d need to get Miss Butterfly involved because the bulk of the polish is hers and I don’t think it would be very nice to say “I am going to use up all your nail polish!” without her prior approval or in a way that failed to involve her.

So I explained my idea and asked if she’d like to be involved. She did want to be involved. And after registering her for high school, we headed to Sally’s for some nail polish swatching wheels. And we delighted in running through our collection and picking polishes out. Here are our wheels:

The one on the left is what we’ve chosen to start with using up. The second one is the rest of the polish in our collective collection. We’ve got an overabundance of magenta colored polish it seems, but most of those polishes are sample sizes and should get used up quickly. Miss Butterfly had a great time painting these swatch wheels and would have painted more if we had more polishes to use.

We’ve set down some rules. No more purchasing polish until some of these are used up. This isn’t a tough rule to follow, as it’s not a huge temptation for either of us. The second rule is that if both of us decide we hate the color or the polish, we can just get rid of it. The orange may be the first to go. It actively annoys Miss Butterfly to see it on my hands, and I don’t like it much either. Then Mr. Ink informed us that he didn’t like the color, which Miss Butterfly absolutely crowed about. Perhaps I can try painting my toenails with it. Or using it to mark progress on our polish bottles. Because I totally forgot to do that.

Here is our starting point on the bottles:

You’ll see that most of these bottles are full or almost full. That’s because we just don’t use them! But we are going to seriously try now. I doubt I’ll have monthly updates on this, and it’ll be a rolling project, we’ll roll in new colors as we roll out the old ones. We added a glitter at the last minute since it may be fun to have a topper for some of these shades. And, the iridescent white may work as a topper for some of these as well. This should help get us experimenting with other pairings as well.

I painted my nails after we arranged all this, but Miss Butterfly didn’t paint hers. She tells me she has to grow out her nails first. Then, she painted my toenails, using the metallic gold color, which hasn’t been done in probably 20 years, and I painted her toenails that iridescent blue. So again, my urge to use up products we’ve got around the house is working in a collaborative way to also spend more time with my kiddo, which is a real win for all involved!