The Best Green Shirt Tops

I own two green shirt tops that have never once been photographed together and honestly should not be, because putting them side by side would start a fight I’m not sure either one wins cleanly.

The first is a bottle green button down I bought three summers ago from a sale rack because the color looked expensive under fluorescent light, which should have been my first warning. It photographs beautifully. Every single picture I have of me in it looks like I have my life together in a way I did not, at the time, have together. But the neckline is cut so wide that reaching for a mug on the top shelf turns it into a completely different, more revealing shirt than the one I put on that morning, and I found this out at a friend’s apartment, in front of her very polite roommate, who suddenly became extremely interested in the contents of the fridge. That shirt looks like a decision in the mirror and like an accident by 11am.

The second is an olive shirt top I almost didn’t buy because the green read a little murky online, more swamp than forest, and I stood in my kitchen for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time deciding if that mattered. It does not photograph the same way. It’s never once made me look like I have my life together. But the collar sits close enough to the collarbone that I have reached, stretched, and full on rummaged through a top cabinet in it without a single moment of concern, and that is worth more to me now than it was worth to me the day I almost put it back.

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That’s the actual argument I keep having with myself: do I want the shirt that photographs like a Tuesday I’m proud of, or the one that behaves like a Tuesday I’m actually living. I don’t think there’s a correct answer, I think there’s just a correct answer for your specific week.

The bottle green one goes with almost nothing else I own, which nobody warns you about with a strong color, it wants dark denim, it wants to be the only interesting thing happening, and pairing it with anything patterned makes me look like I lost a bet. The olive one goes with everything, khaki, navy, gray, even a slightly clashing brown I was nervous about, which is its whole quiet appeal.

If you want a shirt that makes an entrance, buy the bright one, but know it’s a bit of a gamble on anyone who isn’t fully committed to being looked at, it is not a safe universal choice and I will not pretend it is. If you want a shirt you forget you’re wearing until someone compliments it, buy the murky one nobody trusts online. I still own both. I only fully trust one of them in public.