Every year around this time, I get inundated with emails telling me about the latest fall trends and what I should buy and what I should toss.

Having been down this wardrobe rabbit hole before, I didn’t want to make a fall fashion faux pas, such as I did last year, when one trendsetting site told me the “it” shoe was a pointed witchy boot that was so tight it nearly made my pinky toes fall off.

So this year I cross-referenced all the fashion sources to see what everyone agreed on.
And the consensus was … pistachio.

The big fall color was pistachio.

As photos of pretty clothes in hideous shades of pistachio swam before my eyes, I wondered, who decides these things and, for goodness’ sake, why pistachio?

Pistachio is not even a good color for a nut, much less a woman over 50 with a fading summer tan.

Generally, I tend not to do well with clothing colors that are named for foods. I don’t look good in eggplant or cantaloupe or mustard, so I didn’t hold out much hope for pistachio.

And really, calling a color “pistachio” doesn’t distract from the fact that it is basically just ugly green.

It falls somewhere on the color wheel between hospital-room green and algae, neither of which is a particularly good shade for anyone.

When your clothes give you the pallor of a dead person, you know it’s time to move on.

I was duly forewarned when I hit the stores, and even though I was expecting it, the sight of all that pistachio-ness was still a shock.

There were pistachio pants and pistachio coats, and even little pistachio berets for the woman who wants some panache with her pistachio.

A woman with pistachio-painted fingernails breezed by on her way to the racks of pistachio-colored palazzo pants in plaid.

It was all just a little bit excessive and made me long for the days of mustard and cantaloupe.

All around me, trendy women were scooping up the pistachio-colored clothing as though there was about to be a shortage of pistachios and they might be forced to settle for clothes in avocado instead.

As I watched in awe, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try on one pistachio-colored coat just to see how awful it would actually look on me.

I didn’t want to be one of those women who judged a trend without trying it, even if it did make me look like I’d just had food poisoning.

But as I reached for my size, another woman in a pistachio-induced shopping frenzy reached past me and whisked the coat off the rack and into her basket.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I was just about to try that on.”

“Just take another one,” she said dismissively.

“That was the last one in my size,” I replied.

“Forget it,” she said. “I’m doing you a favor. …

“This color would look terrible on you.”