Goldilocks and the Three Polish Bottle Sizes

OK ... so we all know by now that I have chosen to fully embrace the miracle of gel polish. In that giddy way that we all once embraced buying product — back in the day, when we were young and all product was new to us.

The challenge — not the number-one challenge, but the one I'm talking about today — is finding a way to display the color accurately.

Enter Colorpops. What an insanely simple and elegant idea.

I've never really had too much use for Colorpops — until the gel polish came to live on my shelves. So I finally had an excuse to order up some nifty Colorpops Rings, or Ringpops, or whatever they call them.

In my brain, I remember when these little doodads were first introduced, that they were attached to a clear, bendy plastic band — like a little kid's adjustable ring — so they would fit a variety of polish lids. What I ordered are more like little black poker chips that are cleverly cut to fit over a polish bottle lid and hold a size 4 tip.

On the whole, I think I would prefer the original style. The pop rings fit well on most brands of bottles, but the Shellac bottles are too small for the rings and the rings slide down and look sloppy, while the OPI bottles are too big and the rings barely balance at the top of the lids and fall off at the slightest thought of picking up the bottles ...

Seriously? You designed your product so that it doesn't fit one of the most popular brands of polish in the world? [shrug] OK.

So, as far as the lids that don't fit the colorpop things right, I started working on alternatives.

First, I had the brilliant notion to try that Stretch Magic stuff that you can make rings and bracelets out of. I figured I'd just cut it, tie it, acrylic a polished tip to it, and put it on the lid.

But the Stretch Magic isn't all that easy to tie in knots, and I had a hard time getting the tips to lie uniformly on the bottle lids.

Then I remembered the bag of misfit ring bases that was accidently shipped to me last year when I was really into making rings. Aha! And sure enough, with some careful adjusting (did you know OPI's lids take a ring size 11?) I got them to fit the lids just right.

I feel like I found Baby Bear's polish rack.