Painting my nails is a ritual I've adopted since entering college...meaning I've spent more than I probably should on purchasing the multitude of bottles displayed above. I've been keeping tabs on this accumulation since its start at the beginning of my freshman year of college, and I have no intentions of putting a halt to adding to my collection any time soon—the sparkles in my many bottles of glitter nail polish blindside me from doing so.

All jokes aside, however, I've come to the realization that painting my nails is one of my only acts of artistic self-expression I have left.

Days before painting my nails, I'd generate a color palette—typically, two to three swatches I think would look well together—and decide if I wanted to use glitter-infused or glitterless polishes, or an alternation of both. I never repeat the same palette, and always ensure that I don't use the same color in back-to-back wears.

I've figured out that the way you paint nails is NOT the same as the way you paint a painting, which is what I'm used to, but I still have yet to figure out a method that doesn't cause me to get polish on areas of my hands other than the nails themselves. So I definitely don't receive compliments on my nail polish brushing technique, but I do get lovely comments on my palette play, and they're enough to satiate my artistic-validation-starved mind.

I'm no makeup guru, but after giving up art in high school, my recent discovery of the joy of wearing nail polish is a concept I've become so attached to because it's the only artistic activity I've made time for, and can make time for within my busy college life. And as an environmental science major, there's no room for artistic creativity from even within the confines of my studies.

Nail painting may be an everyday concept to many, but to me, it's an essential means of balancing out my math- and science- saturated life. However much I may be a budding environmental scientist, I'm already an artist at heart. I don't want to give up more than I already have, and painting my nails is the simplest way I've devised in preventing myself from becoming too consumed by numbers and figures.

Perhaps one day I'll be able to figure out a better system of sustaining my art and science selves, but for now, I'm happy with just my painted nails being my primary artistic outlet.