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First and foremost, I am a lover of all things misunderstood and socially unaccepted. It’s in my hard-wiring, perhaps in recognition of my own youthful quandaries as an immigrant, introvert, and straight-arrowed studious female. I have a soft spot for defending the outcasts and arguing the other side. For example, I decided in my teen years that my favorite number would be thirteen, donning it on my soccer jerseys because the movie ‘Freaky Friday’ had all my classmates hating on the number. I chose it because “it wasn’t fair”. And when my mother asked what color I wanted to paint my room after we moved for the tenth time in my life, I mortified her by picking a dirty greige-green, the color of mossy detritus. It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that I equally love J Hannah’s newest polish release named similarly after my self-described teenage room. In fact, I adore it.
The color, called Compost, was fashioned after Pantone 448C – a color that market researchers agreed upon as The Ugliest Color in the World. A mix between olive-green and brown, Pantone 448C was originally invented by the marketing agency to slap onto the face of cigarette boxes to deter users from continuing their smoking habit. The message was plain and clear: stay away from this hideous substance, like tar dripping down one’s throat, or the color of ashen decaying lungs after years of smoke. But rather than repulse from this cursed tint, J. Hannah instead embraced the color and revived it as something sophisticated, without changing it.
On Instagram, she writes:
“A study in Jolie-Laide, ‘Compost’ is a statement in the nuanced line between the revolting and the luxurious, between the hideous and the refined. A reminder to not flatten beauty’s complexity into a single note. (In other words, if you know, you know.)”
J. Hannha’s Instagram
For you see, this Compost color is, to me, a beautiful color indeed. It is the color that I seek on my travels abroad, the one I am drawn to in nature and calmed by. Likewise, it is the base shade in my home – a color that sums up the beige, grey, green, and brown hues. I present to you a personal color study of Compost, that hopefully by the end, has you DIGGING it, too.
It reminds me of Michael’s hazel eyes, when the morning light hits it just right.
It is the exact nail color I want on my nails to carry me through the Fall and Winter Seasons.
I have had the pleasure to have been #gifted a bottle of polish and have already tried it on myself. It is the third in my J. Hannah Polish collection- along with Patina and Miso. It pairs quite nicely with all the J. Hannah silver jewelry too (The Pearl Demi Signet recently replaced my wedding ring. Meanwhile the Form Hoops I is my daily earring and I carry a tiny milled Emax tooth in my Objet Pendant.) One thin, watery coat makes for a limey-green moss color, not far from the olive trees lining Jenni Kayne’s home. Two coats adds a smidge of brown, similar with the photograph above, complimenting the color of ground coffee beans. Three coats, though, is my favorite. The color of MENU Space’s NoNo Coffee Table, Nordic Knot’s Norr Malarstrand 01 Rug, and Bemz’s Zaragova Vintage Velvet in Olive Green. The color pairs nicely with black, brown, cream, and rustic terra cotta orange and reds. It is, in my opinion, the jewel tone of today’s modern world, as our field of acceptance and inclusion expands, in a year when it becomes most necessary to make the ugliest of circumstances beautiful. Iykyk.
