A mustard manifesto

I can't say that I truly have a favorite color. In fact, I'm so uncertain of my favorite color, I've actually written a whole blog post about the subject!

Although my color tastes wax and wane, they almost always skew to cooler, more pastel shades, so another thing I can say is that I never would have expected mustard yellow to appear in my short list of preferred hues. But guess what happened.

Over the past 2 years, I've noticed myself being drawn more and more often to darker yellow and golden garments. My mustard cropped cardigan is a "darling of my wardrobe." I'm always trying to find excuses to wear my mustard long-sleeved tee, and I'm beefing up my collection of the color all the time.

My birthday shoes this year, which I lamented were not as shiny and gold as I'd been expecting, could quite accurately be described as mustard. An early summer order from Thredup contained my first-ever pair of mustard pants (really my first-ever pair of pants in any shade of orange or yellow). But when they arrived, I saw that the color, which had seemed so warm online, was almost greenish in real life. I wasn't sure if I was a fan, but I kept the pants and decided to see what happened.

This outfit happened. I had trouble coordinating the oddly colored pants with anything, hence the preponderance of black and white...but the slightly greenish yellow pants did happen to go quite well with my yellowish green shoes.

The 'fit is nothing to get excited over, but the existence of the pants themselves got me to thinking about color—specifically, how we define a particular color and the attributes a shade must have in order to meet the definition. I've had this internal debate about salmon and coral, and now, it seems, it's time to have it about mustard.

Those pants were not the sunny, orange-adjacent hue that I'd hitherto characterized as mustard, but with their slightly green tint, they were actually closer to real-life mustard than any other thing I'd ever bestowed with that descriptor. Real mustard – the kind that comes out of a squeeze jar – isn't golden and warm. It's straight-up yellow with an often sickly (or herbaceous, if you want a more pleasant term) greenish hue.

The color I'd previously been cavalierly referring to as "mustard" for so many years is really, I now have come to believe, more accurately described as "goldenrod," or "marigold," or really any number of other terms with the word "gold" in them. And that's the color I've actually been falling in love with. Not mustard, which runs dangerously close to the same shade as snot and bile.

Much appropriately, the first and only compliment I received when I finally wore my mustard pants was in the bathroom. The giver of said compliment specifically mentioned how much she liked the pants' color...so even if I'm not certain it will ever quite meet my approval, at least it meets someone else's!