working with green

The biggest thing that makes me tick, and something all of my friends know about me, is that I hate green. I hate green. It grosses me out. It looks good with nothing. I simply can't get myself to enjoy it in any way shape or form. Nature, of course, is an exception because it would look anything but natural without it.

If I had to wear green, it would be like these girls do.

I don't know where this started, or why, but it has always been a part of my biases. I remember taking the green markers out of my Crayola packs as a kid because I thought the rainbows looked nicer that way. But I do know that my obsessive feelings about green really started peaking a year or two ago, when I entered college. We were asked, in an assignment involving the painting of many swatches of colors, to paint what we personally considered the ugliest color, and what we thought was the prettiest color. It was hard for me to choose the prettiest. I made a highlighter yellow swatch, a lilac, a coral, a peach, a pale robin's egg blue, and ultimately went with an almost-white orchid. But the ugliest was easy. I simply mixed up a batch of army green and called it a day. That, to me, was the worst green. Then emerald green, then lime green. Chartreuse was warming up to me (since highlighter yellow has been one of my favorites for a few years), and very very pale mint was sometimes acceptable, sometimes.

I have tried many times to get myself into a better relationship with green. I can stand the color more when it is on its own, nothing next to it but a neutral black or white or something comparable. But the idea of wearing a green shirt with jeans was appalling (jeans I still have a hard time believing to be a neutral because they are, in fact, blue). And when I have ventured to own something green, I couldn't stand looking at it next to the other colors in my closet. And green with orange, to me, is a sin. I can't think of something uglier.

My first green investment was a scarf. A very rich, deep, forest green scarf. I wear it only with black and white, and not very often. But baby steps are a necessity for getting over stupid things like hating colors. That baby step seemed to work and I soon got a long sleeve t-shirt in the same color, for lounging around. Green suddenly began popping up on my radar, and I was seeing it everywhere: on celebrities going down the red carpet, in runway shows, Chanel's new Les Khakis nail polish collection ... I guess it was time to give it a rest and get over myself.

As I am typing this I am, rather ironically, wearing a green skirt. An army green skirt. Pretty much exactly the color of that swatch I painted, too. My toes are also painted a metallic, bronzey orange. I think there is going to be hope for me. However, you can be successful and hate a color. The head designer for Abercrombie absolutely hates purple and black ... try to find those colors in an Abercrombie store, the next time you go, if you ever do. He won't hire on principle if you wear those colors to an interview!