Emerald City

I talked in a post a while back about how nobody seemed to know what color Radiant Orchid was, but actually last year's Color of the Year seems to have the same problem, in a way that surprises me. Opinion on Radiant Orchid seems to have settled down a bit now, to a middle-of-the-road red-violet, but at first it was really all over the place, and that's not that surprising because I don't think most people carry a very clear picture in their mind of what color "orchid" is, much less "radiant orchid". (Purples seem to confuse people, anyway, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.) But I would think that most people DO have an idea of what color "emerald" is.

(NOTE: See the bottom of this entry for a list of recent Colors of the Year, if you have no idea what I'm going on about here.)

Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, or it's a generational thing, I don't know. Maybe people don't obsess over color like I do. (I'm sure that's true, in general - but probably not of my fellow nail polish junkies!) I grew up in the era when The Wizard of Oz was an annual television event - I'm not sure where that tradition came from, exactly, but I know it was true for years and years, that it was on TV exactly once a year. I guess whichever network it was had a contract about it, but back then when there was no internet we didn't think much about that. It just showed up once a year and everybody watched it, pretty much. So that's one thing that shaped my perception of "emerald" - it's the color of the Emerald City, of course. And the other thing was pictures of jewelry in catalogs. The emeralds in those old catalogs were usually a little darker than Emerald-City green, but they were a pretty similar color, on the whole. So I have a definite opinion. Emerald is a dark green, but it's green. It's not a bit blue-green, it's like you took a color like "kelly green" - a St. Patrick's Day green - and made it darker. .

Well, the reason I'm going on about this is because there's all these nail polishes that call themselves emerald, but aren't (in my opinion, anyway). I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this issue before, here and there. I think I first started noticing it with Thames, last summer:

Now I don't know for sure what BL's website said in July, but right now it calls it a blue-green. I think it may have been Nordstrom's fault I thought it was supposed to be emerald, and of course I don't have the website from then to look at (in fact as I write this Nordstrom's website is down completely - it says they're "making enhancements") - but you can see where I was talking about this last July, anyway. And in fact I never thought it was emerald at all, looking at the pictures - it was just that Nordstrom said so. (And okay, I will grant that it could pass for emerald if you're not looking close.) But then there came Viridian (from Illamasqua - Sephora's website calls it "peacock green"), and then Darkest Emerald Luxe (from Rococo) which I was talking about yesterday - it just doesn't look very green to me at all. So I'm confused, now, about whether my whole perception of what an emerald looks like has been off for my whole life!


I found a cool graphic with the last 10 official Pantone CotYs, going back to 2004, which is interesting. I think I've only really been aware of it as a Thing for the last 5 years or so, because I do remember some talk about Mimosa, and I definitely remember the flurry of talk about "Honeysuckle" (which was a pink) back at the beginning of 2011.
2009: Mimosa
2010: Turquoise
2011: Honeysuckle
2012: Tangerine Tango
2013: Emerald
2014: Radiant Orchid