Travel

Traveling With Nail Polish: What to Bring? Picking Polish!

This is my second post in a mini series on Traveling with Nail Polish. Be sure to check out the first installment about packing polish for air travel, which included a video showing how I pack polish. :)

For any nail polish junkie like myself, it’s super hard to condense down what I love into a small bag for travel. As you saw in the video showing how I pack, sometimes I don’t condense it too much. LOL! In that particular case, I was going on a girls trip and I knew I would be painting other people’s nails. So I wanted to give them a variety of colors to choose from.

But when I travel just on my own where I know there won’t be an opportunity to paint other people’s nails (which I love to do!), I usually go about it this way…

Choosing Polish

  1. After choosing the clothing I will wear on the trip, I try to pick complimentary nail polish colors. When I’m at home, I generally don’t mind wearing mismatched polish and clothing, but when I’m away I want to look more put together, you know? So first I look at what I’ll be wearing. If there’s just a couple shades that would look nice with my clothing, I’ll pack those shades.
  2. After I pick out the matching shades (usually just two polishes), I’ll throw in a third that’s fun and funky. :) Sometimes I just want to wear a polish that’s fun and I don’t worry about matching my clothing. I usually pick polishes that just feel good and I know that when I’m away from home I’ll at least want the option to pick something daring.
  3. Then into my bag I throw in a basecoat (Orly Rubberized Bonder), topcoat (Seche Vite), small bottle of remover (2 oz. Zoya Remove+), cotton pads, and a nail file.

In total, that’s 5 bottles of polish. For some, that’s just too many. But for me, it’s the smallest amount I can pack without feeling completely deprived. :) In short…

The Packing List

Bottle 1: Complimentary polish color
Bottle 2: Complimentary polish color
Bottle 3: Fun color
Bottle 4: Basecoat
Bottle 5: Topcoat
Small nail polish remover
Cotton pads
Nail File

Or Keep it Simple

To keep it simple, you could also just take nail strips and a topcoat. That would be super easy to pack. :)

When you pack for a trip, what do you take?

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Traveling with Nail Polish: Packing Polish for Air Travel

Hi all! This is the first blog post in a short series I’m doing on traveling with nail polish. In this first post, I’m covering how I pack nail polish for air travel. I usually use this method when I’ll by flying on an airplane, and it works well for travel by ground as well.

Things to note:

  1. Some polishes travel better than others. In particular, I’ve noticed that my CND polishes don’t travel well. They tend to leak no matter how tightly I close the bottles. For that reason, I usually take Orly Rubberized Bonder insead of my usual CND Stickey Base Coat.
  2. For nail polish remover, I use a small travel size bottle (the 2 oz. bottles of Zoya Remove+ are great for this). I “double bag” the remover and then put it either inside the padded toiletry bag with the polishes (if it fits), or just inside my suitcase. As long as the top of the bottle is tightly closed, I don’t have any problem with leaking.

Oh, and CLICK HERE for the info on the cosmetic bag (links to the tutorial).

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