For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, a.k.a. Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fine artist in Brooklyn, New York, has been dressing from head to toe in various shades of green. To her, green is the happiest, most positive color in the world, so she can’t imagine wearing anything else.
‘The Green Lady of Carroll Gardens’, as Elizabeth is most widely known, has always had a thing for experimenting. At one point in her life she wore only 1930s print dresses, before moving on to single colors, like silver, pink, purple, blue and finally green, which she surprisingly never got bored of. Her passion for green started with some home-mixed green nail polish and a neon lime streak in her hair, but it quickly spread to her clothing and her home, as well. Today, she always sports green hair, an attire made up of different hues of green, and most of the things she buys, from towels and skin care products to furniture and appliances, are also green.
Photo: YouTube screengrab
“I never planned for any of this to happen,” Sweetheart told The New York Times. “It’s not an obsession. It just happened naturally. I’ve always used color, collected color. Maybe it was because I grew up in Nova Scotia, and after moving to New York, I missed having green all around me.” All she knows is that green makes her happy, helps her deal with daily problems, so she wouldn’t dream of wearing any other color.
“It’s the most positive color in the whole world,” Elizabeth says. “It makes me feel happy. You can wake up really miserable in the morning and then you get dressed and turn green and it’s quite wonderful.” But that’s not her only motivation for wearing green exclusively. The 75-year-old artist also does it because it makes people happy. “It’s for other people,” she told The South Brooklyn Post. ” I like to make people happy. And for the children. I was really not an outgoing person. But I say hello to anyone who talks to me and I love it. The young children love it.”
“It’s just amazing traveling with her,” Elizabeth’s husband Dylan confirms. “People shout from cars, children flock to her on the train and tourists take pictures of her. The most diverse people call to her from across the street, give her thumbs up, call her ‘Miss Green.’”
But finding everything you want to wear in a single color can’t be very easy, especially when you’ve been doing it for 20 years. The Green Lady shops for the staple of her wardrobe – green overalls, of which she has almost 30 pairs – at stores like GapKids, The Children’s Place and Old Navy’s, but even if she doesn’t find what she’s looking for in green, she can always dye it. She ‘cooks’ a pot of green dye every morning, to dye her hair strands and all her garments. Everything she wears, from her underwear and socks to the clothes on her back and the butterfly hair clips has to be green.
Elizabeth’s house is mostly green as well, from the front door to her backyard, and everywhere in between. Her bed linens, the window curtains, chairs, and even things like pots, pans, pens and hygiene products, they are all green. “I can’t even sleep unless I’m all in green,” the Green Lady told Patch.com.
Asked if she ever gets tired of green, Elizabeth Sweetheart said “Oh no, never. It keeps getting better every day.”
The Green Lady of Brooklyn is not the only color-obsessed person we’ve featured on Oddity Central. Five years ago, we wrote about Charlotte price, a woman obsessed with the color pink, and in 2014 we featured Sevenraj, an Indian real-estate agent who surrounded himself with red and white.
