Organize It: Cataloging Your Mineral Pigment Sample Stash

Hi everybody,

Although I am not the neatest person I've known, I believe "a cluttered desk is a cluttered mind." While people embrace their cluttering and call it "creative chaos", I just simply refer my clutter as a mess. Sometimes, I have some sort of classification for my mess, aka "the dump system" or "the pile system", I realize I can only be sane if the mess is temporary. Who can live day to day having to step over junk to get to their desk? Not me, nuh uh!

Having all those said, I have quite a lot of mineral makeup samples gathered around the house. Of course, I had my own system to classify them and it looks like this:

Similar colors are bunched in the same bag

The advantage of this system is it does not take a lot of space to store stuff. However, it does not justify the disadvantage to find stuff when I need them. So, what takes to bring high entropy to this stash?

Y'all, I had to bring in the big gun: the photo album!

The wonderful part about the photo album is it lets me cataloging all my samples based on whatever classification I prefer. I chose to classify them in groups of colors (highlights, neutrals, golds, blues, greens, etc). It takes a bit of sorting to do and some space to do the sorting as well.

You sort out your samples like so, from dark to light (or light to dark)

That's a part of my purple pigment samples

And here is the result:

Highlighting colors

Golds and browns

Purples

Greens

Blues

Reds and dark colors

Black pigments

While cataloging my pigments, I realized this is very similar to what my nephews have been doing with their baseball and Yugio cards. I prefer to put 2-3 pigment samples per sleeve side, more than that would be difficult to get out. So far, I filled up 120 pages of that album and found out I have an obscene amount of purple pigments. Yet, I rarely use purple at all, what gives?

Of course, you can always get a bigger album to catalog all your samples. It is a fun activity that does not take a lot of time to do. Also, once organized, it will not give you so much troubles to find your pigments in the future.

What do you think? Please give me your comments, ok?

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