A century ago in the early days of automobiles, the motto went: “You can buy a Ford motorcar in any color you like—as long as it’s black.” An equal number of choices were available when it came to brand name or body style.
By the middle of the last century, though, all that had changed. Not only were there cars on the road besides Fords—Packards, Buicks, Studebakers and more—but they came in a festival of colors.
My brother’s first car was a fire-engine red ‘57 Chevy convertible that was the terror of the neighborhood. My first car was a beat-up ‘56 Plymouth that we called “Minty-Pepto” because it was a two-tone mint green and Pepto-Bismol pink. Meanwhile, our parents drove a two-tone ’55 Chevy station wagon that we affectionately dubbed diarrhea green and pee yellow.
But that wasn’t the only change that had happened in the world of automobiles, because unlike the pioneer Ford cars, these mid-century monsters changed their styles dramatically from year to year. It was a race to see who could be the first on the block to guess how the headlights would be arranged, or how high the tail-fins would soar over the fenders on the new models, which were close-guarded secrets until the fall unveiling.
Fast forward to the start of the new millennium, and the new idea of choice was to have no choice at all. That’s because the millennial motto was “You can have your new car any color you like—as long as it’s silver, and it’s an SUV instead of a car.” And you could rest assured that your car’s body wouldn’t go out of style any time soon, because car companies would crank out the same body style for a half-decade or more. Besides which, every make of SUV looked pretty much like any other make of SUV.
I would heap ridicule on anybody who would drive a flavorless SUV the color of old dental fillings, except that I drive one like that, so let’s just move on.
Of course, while millennial color and body style were stuck on hold, there were other important innovations in the automotive world during that time, like the remote key fob that caused your car’s lights to blink on and off when you pushed the button. It was developed to stop you from kicking the side door in anger when your car wouldn’t unlock in the parking lot—until you realized that yours was the identical SUV parked six identical SUV’s away.
Ah, progress!
But now, it seems that it’s all about to change again.
Because just today, as my wife and I sat at a traffic light, I glanced at the new Jeep standing in front of us and said, “What in the world would you call that color?”
It would be hard to describe, except to say that no car should ever be that hue. Like blue food or brown sports jerseys, it just wasn’t right.
In a less enlightened age, I guess you would say it was flesh-toned, like those Crayola crayons from back in the day before corporate America discovered that not all flesh is the same shade.
“Who would ever want to drive around in a car that color?” I asked. And please don’t think that it was a racist remark, because that fleshy Jeep was the color of my own flesh. If I sat in it naked, you’d think the car was driving itself—with a patch of chest hair magically hovering near the steering wheel.
But the question was barely out of my mouth before a Lexus pulled up next to the Jeep, and it was almost exactly the same color, though with a bit more gray in it. The Crayola folks might have called it “lifelong-smoker flesh color,” or maybe “morning-after-the-binge flesh color.”
I started looking around, and though I saw nothing that looked quite as cadaverous as those two new cars, it seemed the world had shifted somehow while I wasn’t looking. Silver SUV is no longer the flavor of the day, it seems. It’s been replaced by a whole 31-flavor menu of hues, spanning over the entire spectrum that one might call “fleshy.”
African chocolate browns.
Italian tans.
Indian mochas.
Even Irish-after-a-day-on-the-beach pinks.
Silver? That’s so last-decade. Red, yellow, or bright green? What are you driving, a Pez dispenser?
It’s time to get with the program when it comes to the tasty tints of today, and the new flavor-of-the-day is flesh.
Of course, there are still those drivers who insist on claiming the extremes—glistening pitch black or blinding pure white. And I guess that makes sense, since our politics seem to run that way these days during primary elections.
But between those extremes, parking lots these days are flashing more flesh than MTV Spring Break.
I only just noticed it today. You may have seen it sooner. Heck, you may be one of those guys tooling around in one of these epidermobiles.
Anyway, I think I’ll take a pass on joining the fleshy fold. I think I’ll wait until the next big shake-up in the auto industry, which will probably be transparent plexiglass bodies that reveal the guts of your engine and drive train.
After all, why does auto beauty have to stop skin-deep when there are internal organs waiting for their day in the sun?
