Last summer, a lace dress was my must-have. After an exhaustive search, I finally found a lace dress winner. Five days later, my online order arrived and my excitement went into rewind when I saw this otherwise perfect dress’ hideous tan lining.

I returned it to the store and noticed that the despicable tan lining was on most of the other lace dresses. The Sales Associate (SA) explained that the lining was SKIN-colored to give the dress a transparent look.

 Years ago, I was shopping at Nordstrom at the Galleria in Dallas for coffee colored pantyhose [Aside: I had a job with a horrible boss who required me to wear pantyhose.  After being sent home twice for disregarding her rule, I grudging complied with her insane request. I’m glad that pantyhose, are no longer fashionable or expected, except that Kate Middleton is trying to ruin that trend]. Anyway, quality coffee-colored pantyhose were next to impossible to find. I complained to the manager. Her reply: “We really only stock SKIN tone colors, so we don’t expect them to order more brown.”

 Last fall, I started searching for nude shoes — the goal: shoes that matched the color of my skin to give me that long-legged look. I explained the look I was going for to my favorite shoe SA and asked her to bring me all the nude shoes she had with at least a four-inch heel. She came back with TAN and beige shoes.

 On Facebook, a page for a movement that campaigns for manufacturers to produce more brown bras received over 3,000 likes. This campaign was covered in the news and many fashionista bloggers have written about it as well. [Aside: In case you didn’t know, brown girls look terrible in nude bras. Yet nude bras are always plentiful — especially at sales.]

 Just like Crayola ditched the peachy color “flesh” back in 1961, fashion has got to ditch “Nude” as a term to define skin tone. It seems that the industry thinks this label applies to ONE skin tone, a color shared by maybe 9% of the world’s population. We can’t allow them to define skin’s color in one way. If nude is skin-colored, then there are hundreds of nudes – and they include brown.

 Needless to say I never found a lace dress last year, but at least now they are coming in a greater variety of colors, so I’ll probably start that search again.

 But recently I finally stumbled upon the perfect pair of NUDE shoes. And they are just my color.