My Favorite Color is Green

On the evolution of a favorite color and what it actually represents

If you spend any amount of time with me, you will learn very quickly that my favorite color is green. Almost everything I own is green: my phone case, my journal, my water bottle, my every day bag, leggings, sweaters, bras. If it comes in green, I will be getting it in green.

If I had to guess, I would assume that most people probably don’t consider why their favorite color is their favorite color. I know I never have. My favorite color is green just because it is – no explanation necessary. It’s a color I’m drawn to, a color that makes me happy.

But my favorite color wasn’t always green. And maybe that’s where things get tricky.

No, for a long time, my favorite color was red. Bright, blaring, fire-engine red. Blood red. The red of a stoplight, the red of Valentine’s Day rose.

Someone recently asked me, why green? I considered it for a moment, letting the question bounce around inside my head. My knee-jerk reaction was: because it just is. But is that true?

Why green? Why red? When did it switch? Why did it switch?

I think back to New Year’s Eve in high school, packed into a basement with friends and strangers and boys I desperately wanted to kiss. I wore a satin white dress with pearls along the collar. My lips were painted a bright red. I remember a boy stumbling over to me, hot beer breath inching down my neck, and complimenting my lipstick.

”I love your red lipstick,” he slurred. “Most girls can’t pull it off, but it’s so good on you."

I was embarrassed by how much his words meant to me, how I slipped away into the bathroom afterwards and meticulously reapplied my lipstick. How I waited all night to be noticed again, only to go home without a midnight kiss.

I think back to my first date with an older boy. I wore a red cotton dress that was high in the front and low in the back. He picked me up on a sweaty August day, delicately running his fingers over my thigh as I settled into the passenger seat. “I like this dress a lot,” he said, eyes glazing over my body.

I made a mental note of this, as you do of most things when you’re young. You know what makes you noticeable, you know what gives you value. You know when an invisible girl is no longer hidden. For me, it was when I was drenched in red.

And so, red was my favorite color. It wasn’t so obvious to me back then, of course. I thought I just liked it. But looking back now I can see that it’s a color that men seemed to like on me, and that was as good a reason as any.

As part of my psychological experiment, I try and run through the reasons why I might love green so much now. To me, green is so much different from red: instead of bright and loud, it’s grounded and calm. It’s of the earth, the trees, the stems of flowers on my countertop. Sure, it’s easy to say that green reminds me of nature, and I’m sure that’s true to an extent.

But I think back to one moment in particular with a small, fox-like puppy in my arms. I was up in Vermont and had made the decision to adopt my foster dog an hour before. I was 25 years old, I was in debt, and I lived in a third floor walk up apartment. But I couldn’t let him go. I knew he had to be mine for every day he had left on earth.

I drove to a pet store, perusing the aisles with different collars, until I found the perfect one: it was green with little orange foxes on it. I got a green leash and a green metal name tag to match: Simon.

I picked the collar because of the foxes. The green was an accident. But soon, everything that Simon owned was green: his raincoat, his bandanas, his towels, his poop bags. Green became synonymous with Simon, the thing I love most in the world.

So now, I look around at my apartment. I see green everywhere, including on the little dog sleeping beneath my feet. Green blooms in every corner of my life, in everything I love. I think back to this past weekend, when I purchased a green shirt for my boyfriend. Even he is drenched in green, brushstrokes on the things that are most precious to me.

A color is a color. It could mean nothing, and it doesn’t really matter. But as I write in my green journal, in my green shorts, drinking out of my green coffee mug, I know – I’m surrounding myself with love everywhere I go. The color that made me a target for men got swiftly replaced with a color with roots deep, deep in the ground.