Why There is No Such Thing as a Favorite Color

During a chat with my manicurist Rosa at Galaxy Nails in Land Park yesterday, Rosa asked me to name my favorite color. Perhaps it’s because I tend to pick a wild assortment of colors for my nails, depending on my present mood, and it rarely includes any association to my previous manicure color. Which means my toe color doesn’t always match my fingertips but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore in 2015. We no longer are forced to be matchy-matchy. We can wear plaids with stripes if we like. Dots with squares. Shave half of our heads and paint green-like-a-lawn the mowed half. Who cares?

I stared at Rosa, hard. I have no favorite color. There is no such thing as a favorite color. It does not exist. There might be colors I favor, which is just about all of them, but there is no favorite color because it’s impossible and a ridiculous thing to ask. It’s like somebody made up that question so now everybody asks it, and we’re expected to have an answer. Some people, I imagine, feel badly if they don’t have an answer so they create a mythical color and attach themselves to it, never giving the selection a second thought.

Like Rosa.

She responded that purple was her favorite color. No, it’s not, I laughed. Oh yes, says, Rosa: I like a purple dress, and I love purple flowers! There, evidence.

I could see she had fallen into that trap many years ago when somebody asked her for a favorite color and she probably felt forced to choose. There’s a certain amount of chutzpah to choose purple because purple is a regal color, a color of power, and a color of mystical insight. If you asked Oprah, she’d probably say purple is her favorite color, too. But Oprah, I hate to say, is wrapped up in her own reality. She is not a goddess, people. Purple is a shy-away-from color for most people. It’s also a secondary color, not primary, and most people tend to select primary colors for favorite colors, or shades of a primary like pink.

To say you love a certain color above any other color is to reduce all of the other colors in the world to a devalued state. All colors are beautiful. Even cat-puke green.

Would you buy a purple car? I asked. Well, no, she admitted. OK, would you paint your house purple? No. Definitely not.

I think the light was beginning to dawn.

Then we had a long discussion about sellers who refuse to paint the interior of their homes to get rid of bright colors and make their homes more saleable. They say things like, oh, the buyer can paint the room whatever color the buyer wants. That’s an excuse for laziness on the seller’s part. Own it. It’s also ignorant, because the buyer might not buy the home. If the buyer does make an offer, that paint job will turn into thousands of dollars of a discount.

It’s like saying a seller will give a buyer a carpet allowance. They don’t think through this idiotic statement. They don’t think about the buyer moving in and then moving all of the furniture into the garage when the carpeting arrives. We live in Sacramento, it’s not like you can waltz into a carpet store and have new carpet installed that afternoon. On top of that, the buyer will need to make choices in color, texture, pattern, material, not to mention padding. Measure the rooms, too. Fork out extra cash or run up a credit card. It’s a huge hassle.

And after the carpeting is installed, the seams will be visible, the house will smell, the workmanship sloppy, and then the buyer’s tempers will flare. It’s all way too much work. Home sellers should install new carpeting, if the home needs it. Problem solved.

But don’t tell me you have a favorite color because you don’t. Let’s reverse this trend. Put a stop to this nonsense.