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.
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