Were you been all my life iCarousel Nail Polish Book App?

Inadvertent dupes. I think we've all done it.

You're in the drugstore, there's a polish you've been kind of stalking for a while but that brand is never on sale except just this once it's buy one get one 50% off.

You snatch up the holo glitter laden object of your affection and spy another shade that's pretty snazzy now-that-you-mention-it and finally you get it home to realize it's SO snazzy.....

...that you already had one just like it (but maybe even a better formulation) and now you have a dupe. If you pulled the labels off your swatch sticks you'd be hard pressed to match them back up correctly but it probably wouldn't matter anyway, they're that close.

Wah wah.

I've been doing swatch sticks for all of my polishes which has helped identify holes pretty well, but that doesn't really help when you're at the store staring at those polish racks thinking "that's right I needed a different teal" but trying to remember if you have THE ONE PARTICULAR variation of teal you have in front of you. Heck, I recently ended up with two bottles of the same shade of Superman blue. Thankfully it was a cheapie (Sinful Colors Endless Blue, in particular) but still a waste, and also not the first time I've done it.

Luckily as a problem solving hominid with an exorbitant mobile phone bill which I might as well get the most out of I have cataloging tools at my disposal the likes of which the world has never seen! I did a search for IOS nail polish apps and immediately found Nail Polish Book which has pretty handily solved the entire issue.

These images ganked from the app's iTunes listing

If you like me are into fussy levels of organization this may well be the perfect tool for you. Well, except for the laborious data entry part. That kind of stinks and I'm only about halfway done, but I figure that's my penance for having so much polish. The data entry is pretty easy, you can add your own notes, and get in to individual entries after the fact to edit with ease. Sorting is easy by any number of parameters, and results show both visual and text. Bonus: it searches in notes so you could set up a whole extra keyword system if you like. I really like that you can add your own entries to the shades listing, For example I felt the need to add "effect topcoats", "flakies" "multicolour glitters" and "crellies" as groupings as I find those items really don't group well by overall colour.

This is a screenshot from my phone, even here those two polishes are grouped together!

OH, AND BY THE WAY IT'S FREE*

I can only think of a few features to add.
First and foremost while I appreciate that it natively groups "shades" together I really like to see my stuff in carefully curated rainbow order so tweakable item ordering would be AWESOME. That said, this app is super handy for note keeping and shopping, but for actual in the moment "what colour am I going to use today" decisions I will probably continue using my swatch sticks, which I already keep on binder rings in rainbow order so that's not THAT big of a deal.
I just figure if I'm going to be fussy I might as well go all out. 

It would seem I really like cool pinks and aquas.

It would be cool to have some kind of pre-filled reference-able database because lazy and because sometimes my pics don't come out quite right. You can however add pics from your photo album, so if I found a better pic online I'd just have to save it to my phone first. 

Finally I am slightly concerned over what would happen to my data if I lost/traded in this phone because entering my collection has been a fairly big time sink and I can't tell if this is data backed up anywhere other than locally on my phone.

So yeah, if you have too much nail polish, a fussy personality, and an IOS friendly device, get on that. I don't see a direct Android version but there seems to be a similar product. I haven't tried that one out though so caveat emptor.


*I am not being compensated in any way for this review. Stumbled on this one on my own.