MADE IN THE SHADE.

You could say that Leslie Harrington owes much of her success to the rise of wasabi green. Harrington is a color consultant who helps manufacturers determine the palette of their products and packages. Her clients have included Crayola, Pottery Barn, and Avon, and she's currently at work on a statistical survey for a pharmaceutical company, analyzing public reaction to different pill colors. "It depends on the context, of course--I wouldn't expect it to be a huge seller for lipstick--but the biggest color story over the past five years has been wasabi, or any green in that color family," she said. "Everywhere you look--cars, furniture, stationery--you see it: a light, yellow-based green."

Harrington, who is forty-four, lives with her husband and daughter in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, though you can hear her Canadian origins in her gently upward cadences. Her hair is a color she might describe as "mid-chroma, mid-value blond with fruitwood undertoning." She didn't invent wasabi green (a distinction that probably belongs to the Japanese), but she got in on the trend early. That was in 1998, at her previous job, as the director of color for the paint company Benjamin Moore, when she set about overhauling its entire contemporary palette.

The system hadn't been updated for twelve years, and the problem with it, Harrington recalled, was that its colors were "dirty"--in colorist's parlance, they had a good deal of gray in their composition. "The system had been developed when gray was trending really strong. The eighties--it was the height of the gray period, you know?" At the time, Harrington had just begun to notice colors in the yellow-green family coming into use. "It was introduced in small doses as very acid, more of a chartreuse, and it was big in fashion, but we tweaked it over time and it became sort of more . . . minty, more pistachio," she recalled. Two of its biggest popularizers were Pottery Barn (upholstery) and Martha Stewart (paint and housewares). Harrington's palette, which is still Benjamin Moore's basic contemporary color system, contains nearly fifty light, yellow-based greens, including Yew Green, Apple Green, Snow Cone Green, Spring Moss, Fresh Cut Grass, Lime Green, New Lime, Summer Lime, Eccentric Lime, Tequila Lime, Frosty Lime, Shimmering Lime, Neon Lime, Key Lime, Citra Lime, Fresh Lime, Lime Tart, Lime Froth, Lime Sorbet, and Limelight. By contrast, the previous palette had about twenty-five, including O'Reilly Green, Feel the Energy, and Sounds of Nature.

Harrington and her colleagues in the color business work for manufacturers of nearly every sort of product: paint, carpeting, pigment, fragrances, fabric, furniture, cars, sports equipment, electronics, home appliances, paper goods, building supplies, and even flowers. It's only the fashion world that operates independently of the color consultants--"though fashion's color decisions tend to trickle down to influence the rest of us," according to John Bredenfoerder, a design director for a brand-consulting firm in Cincinnati. In the color industry, wasabi's surge has been interpreted in a number of ways: as evidence of a back-to-nature trend in consumer aesthetics, spurred by a growing concern for the environment; as an indication that, since September 11th, public taste has run toward subtle, soothing colors; as a reflec-tion of the ongoing luxuryspa craze (pale and clear blues, often referred to as "water colors," are also in this category).

"It also tells us how quickly something that's thought of as a no-no color can take off," Harrington told me. For decades, a running joke among color professionals had been the avocado-hued kitchen appliances of the nineteen-seventies. (The refrigerators outlasted the color's popularity, creating a vicious backlash.) During the ensuing decades, all yellow-based greens--often known as "puke green" or "snot green"--were off limits.

Harrington was raised in Ontario, where her mother supported their family by working at a Benjamin Moore paint store (her father died when she was eight). "I grew up in what I call 'the matchy-poo era'--when women like my mother went to all this trouble to make sure that the towels matched the sheets, which matched my walls, which matched my wardrobe, which matched my car," she told me. In high school, she was too shy to order a pizza, and she flunked an English class for refusing to complete the public-speaking project. To help her overcome the problem, her mother began bringing her into the paint store every day and making her wait on customers, something she continued to do through college, at the nearby International Academy of Merchandising and Design.

Shortly before graduating, she got a call from Benjamin Moore's Canadian headquarters. The company was preparing to launch a North American road show to promote a new computerized color-matching system, and the person who was supposed to run the show had fallen ill. Harrington recalled, "Apparently, somebody in corporate said, 'How about that girl at the ...