It’s funny that mint, the plant, isn’t mint, the color, although both are similarly cheerful-seeming with a twisted secret. Mint the herb will take over most any container you plant it in, strangling its unsuspecting neighbor plants. Mint the color seems similarly harmless and fresh, but its irresistible creaminess is ultimately a little nauseating.
Mint is pretty but it’s not sexy. Mint can also be innocent, in theory, although I’d say it’s more like faux-innocent. It’s like if you liquefied the entire dentist experience and turned it into a color, and took it like a pill. A level of cleanliness I don’t want and yet can’t resist.
Too much mint is institutional, treacherous. The upscale paint company Farrow & Ball offers a murky shade of mint called Arsenic that people use in children’s bedrooms, for instance — creepy, and yet I would still use it. Mint is pure evil, which is also, somehow, delicious.
If mint were a person, she’d be a poreless and eternal 19-year-old. She’d have sharp teeth, and she’d be popular, cold-blooded, and omnipotent. Chewing gum, ruining your self-esteem. Mint is funny, and mean. Mint wants to play doctor, but with chloroform. And you say, well okay, just this once.
Designers understand mint’s perverse appeal. For spring 2019, Maryam Nassir Zadeh showed a mint dress with tangerine tights. It was strapless, but there was nothing slinky about it. Marc Jacobs’s fall 2019 collection contained a dress the color of a hospital wall. And Jacquemus rendered one of his breathtakingly sheer spring 2019 dresses in mint, playing up the color’s faux innocence — a goddess gown, but for a trickster goddess.
Can you imagine getting married in a mint wedding dress? Heaven would pour into hell.
Scroll down for 16 mint things to wear right now.
At $6 , these earrings are the perfect way to try out the trend.