Mauvin' On Up

I did not know what mauve was for the first half of my life and I was okay with that. Then a relative who shall be nameless, who considers his or herself to have excellent taste, replaced their bedroom carpet with a new one that was very much mauve. The rationale behind mauve is that you would be embarrassed to have a pink rug, so you add a bit of grey to it and call it mauve, but it's still pink. We made fun of the mauve carpet when we were out of the relative's earshot.

Fast-forward about 10 years and we're re-doing our bathroom. I don't want to go into home renovation detail, but we basically took a little-used room and combined it with a teeny bathroom to make a big bathroom and dressing area. Being an adult causes you to do this kind of thing from time to time, especially when you have a small, ugly bathroom. The new bathroom is almost blindingly white and very pretty (for a bathroom), but we didn't want a tile floor in the dressing area- we wanted fluffy carpet. So guess what color we picked?

I don't remember the process by which we got the mauve carpet. I'm guessing somebody suggested it and I said okay. It's fine, really. The dressing area is about 4 x 8 feet and it's mostly just like a closet. It does have a window, but we always keep the shade down because it's a dressing room. It has a full-length mirror and places to keep all of our clothes. It's nice.

So why am I bothering to mention this? Because I have discovered a serious problem with the dressing room. We have regular lights in that room. Most indoor lighting has what they call in the color business a "warm" tone. It's a bit reddish and a bit yellowish. "Cool" light is more blue. Light color is actually measured in degrees on the Kelvin scale. Warm light is in the 1500-3000 degree range and cool light is 4000 degrees plus. The color of objects is based on the colors of light that it reflects. Warm light is more pleasant, but it makes every color look warmer than it really is.

This would not pose a problem if I never left the dressing room, but I do on a daily basis. I can tell you with absolute certainty that all colors look different in a mauve dressing room than they do either outdoors or in fluorescent lighting like we have at school. The result is that on any occasion when I want to see if things will match when I get to work, it ends up being a completely wild guess. Things that seem to match perfectly in the mauve room look ridiculous in fluorescent lighting. My reaction to this is to wear black, blue and grey most of the time, along with outfits that I've worn several times before. This is boring and not my preference but is better than looking silly.