Redundant In a Good Way.

This pile of stuff is what would eventually become my Melmer. If you're wondering if you are supposed to know what a Melmer is, don't worry. A Melmer is a small 3-drawer filing cabinet style storage system. The name was coined by the online beauty/nail polish community and comes from a product Ikea sells, called the Helmer. The Helmer started being used as nail polish and makeup storage, and then when people started using something similar from Michaels for the same purpose, it became known at the Melmer. The storage system is actually intended for scrapbooking storage, but happens to work perfectly for storing nail polish too. I was in desperate need of a new storage system, and decided I couldn't go wrong with the Melmer. I've been considering it for a few weeks now and finally got around to going to Michaels where I picked one up. (If you go to the store, don't ask for the Melmer, they'll have no idea what you mean.) The original price was $35.00 but Michaels has a lot of great sales (when I was planning to go a few weeks ago I had a 50% off coupon) and I was able to get it for 40% off, which after tax ending up costing me $22.00.


Once I got the Melmer home I was eager to build it and get everything organized (I love both organization and nail polish so it seemed like a win win situation.) However, I'm not the most handy person in the world. Despite that, I set to work building the Melmer. It thankfully wasn't too complicated, but it was time consuming for me. I decided not to pay attention to the time though, I just set Pandora on my favorite station at the moment (Hedley) and stayed focused. The picture was taken over 2/3 of the way through my building adventure, which did end up being a good excuse to break out my paisley tape measure.


And here is the Melmer finished and waiting to be filled with polish!


I had a bit of trouble getting photos of the polishes actually in the drawers. Things were either too blurry or too bright or not even close.


After playing around with my camera settings a bit I ended up getting the best results with the "food" setting. Who would have guessed? I was able to fit all of my nail polish into one drawer of the Melmer. There are around 115 polishes in that drawer, which means it really can hold a ton of polish. Currently I have the polishes organized first my brand and then by color, but I might change things depending on what ends up being the most convenient for me. I have a tendency to organize and reorganize until things are perfect.


Right now the second drawer is home to all things deemed "nail polish related." That means base and top coats (recommend me a new base coat while we're on the topic), files, buffers, nail art tools (more on my favorite one, Konad, in another post), etc. This drawer still has plenty of room and I haven't even touched the third drawer. That leaves me lots of room to expand my nail polish collection and it also means I can keep other things in the Melmer too, which is what I plan to do at school. I haven't quite decided what yet but I know there will be something! After seeing the Melmer in person I even think it could work a bit of double duty in my dorm come fall as a night stand too.

Question time! You know I love to hear your thoughts too. Today I want to know:

1. How do you store your nail polish?
2. Is nail polish something you love to collect or something you prefer to keep to just a few favorite shades?

Happy 4th of July!