Gold rush

I have nothing against gold. In fact, the first earrings I ever had, studs that were punched into my earlobes during childhood, were gold. But what can I say. I'm a silver person.

I don't know exactly when this life decision came about, but it seems that one gravitates toward the silver or gold camp in the teen years. Up until then there's a sort of indifference or unawareness. Then one day you wake up and one precious metal says cool and understated, while the other conveys self-importance and flashiness, and you pick a side, and that's that.

Anyway, it has always been easy enough to avoid gold, with popular taste increasingly favoring silver-colored-type metals like platinum, particularly for wedding rings (hello, Lucida ring, anyone?). But this summer, stores have been awash in gold. Bags, shoes and clothing with gold hardware, gold bows and gold chains, chains, more chains.

I caved.

It started out small with gold horse-bit-like links on a pair of sandals I fell in love with. Next, a long chain necklace, which I'm wearing today. I still prefer silver, mind you. But today I just felt like being a little flashy.

Gray matters

Standing in the checkout line at H&M the other day, I couldn't help but notice a girl with an armload of clothes stacked from her outstretched arms right up to her fashionably long bangs. "That's a lot of gray," said the shopgirl to the bangs girl when it was her turn to pay. Without skipping a beat, Bangs Girl replied, "Yeah. Gray is the new black, you know." My first reaction was to shudder at what she said--the trite phrase, the earnest tone--but then my attention was drawn the clothes piled on the counter. They looked more like a black or even a faded black in color than the gray she was so keen on.

It reminded me of the issue I had with my new Kate Spade pumps. In the store, I was drawn to the gleaming gray patent and was thrilled to add gray footwear to my shoe collection. But when I opened the box at home, I was so sure that the shoes I brought home were brown, not gray, that I triple-checked the box label ("color: gray," it said) and then looked online to make sure it didn't come in brown (it doesn't).

After some subsequent research, I learned that gray extends much further than the charcoal and heather shades that I know. All those hyphen-gray and -ish-gray terms that are thrown around colloquially, like purple-ish gray, blue-gray, reddish gray, are all fully grays. Heck, even taupe is classified as gray. Taupe!

A gray area of color, that's for sure.