Ice Cream Greens

The Vintage Hat Series: 1950s straw toque and saucer hatsThe conventions in colour naming are amusing. Arbiters of fashion and interior design so often push colour names that are aesthetically appealing – and understandably so – but they are very often entirely imprecise. Plants and foodstuffs and other objects in nature are obvious sources of inspiration. Sometimes they are simply odd (puce, oxblood), and other times entirely misleading: lemon being one such example. We have been trained to expect a pale, pastel yellow hue when in fact the fruit of the lemon tree is a vivid and strong sunny yellow.

The Vintage Hat Series: 1950s straw toqueMint and pistachio are two such suspiciously named colours. A random search of images online reveals they may be perceived to be almost exactly the same, except that mint ranges from a cool watery hue to a warm pastel green, while pistachio sticks to the warmer shades of green. The popular notion of pistachio is close to accurate when compared with the inner kernel of the nut, but almost every rendition of mint is wildly inaccurate. For what do mint leaves actually look like? A very bright, strong leaf green! Perhaps ‘mint icecream’ would be a more apt description. The very watery cool hue popularly perceived as mint I would describe as celadon, although it too ranges between warm and cool tones.

The first recorded use of pistachio as a colour name was as far back as 1789, while mint appeared only in 1920. Probably it described a pale green, as pastel shades were hugely popular in the Twenties, and this is possibly where the popular notion of mint as a pale shade comes from.

The Vintage Hat Series: 1950s straw saucer hatTwo summer hats I bought last year are – except for shape and trim – amusingly alike. They are both made from pistachio coloured straw (although some might call them mint). One, a toque, is trimmed with rows of cream lace and a birdcage veil, and the other, a saucer hat is trimmed with light olive velvet ribbon and squashed satin roses. I like the contrasting green tones of the latter. It’s best worn at a slightly roguish – or dare I say it, saucy angle.