A shade of a different color

I was paging through a magazine recently and came across an article about an exciting new color decorators are using to paint walls, and anything else that stands still long enough. The new color? Greige.

It’s apparently a mixture of gray and beige. It isn’t enough to have two nondescript, dull colors; someone had to go and mix them together and come up with greige.

Some time ago, taupe became popular. It looks sort of like greige. Wikipedia says it’s a combination of gray and brown.

According to Wikipedua, “taupe often overlaps with tan and even people who use color professionally (such as designers and artists) frequently disagree as to what "taupe" means.”

 Some people who claim to know say taupe is the color of a French mole. I don’t know about French moles, but I’ve seen a few American moles; they looked brown to me.

So now one can decorate one’s home in greige or taupe. Perhaps gray or beige or tan have become too passé to be considered in one’s living room. One must now redecorate in greige.

Before taupe came along, people who consider themselves experts in color created variations of white: eggshell, off-white, parchment, ad nauseam. No matter how you spread it, it looked like every rental unit in the country – white.

In the early part of this century I bought a car that looked beige. The salesman told me it was champagne. The Mazda website called it sand. This was years before we knew about greige.

Remember teal? It wasn’t blue and it wasn’t green, it was somewhere in the middle. It became a popular color.

What does it all mean? Why do we need to invent new colors, especially new nondescript neutral hues that all look like each other? Is it a marketing ploy to sell paint and fabric? Give a color a different name and people will think it’s new and they have to have it?

It’s tempting to say Henry Ford had the right idea when he said buyers of his Model T could have any color they wanted as long as it was black. According to the Web site Woot, it didn’t happen.  

However, Woot says, “It’s true that the Ford Motor Company turned black paint into a science, using 30 different types of black paint for different parts of the car’s exterior. But when the Model T first came on the market, customers could get almost any common color —except for black! Blue, gray, green, and red were all available, but not black. The first black Model T didn’t roll off the assembly line until five years later. Towards the end of the Model T’s life, six new colors were introduced, from Royal Maroon to Phoenix Brown to Highland Green. In between, it’s true, there was over a decade of monochromatic Model T’s. Some have said that Henry Ford made the switch to black paint because it dried faster, but history suggests it was just an efficiency issue: black paint was cheap and durable, and turning out only one color of car cheaper still.”

I wonder what he’d have to say about greige?