Someone brought a black vase into the office to settle a debate about whether the matte finish shows dust more than gloss, and it caused a proper argument that ran for the best part of a week and, honestly, has not fully died down. One side held that matte hides everything, dust included, on the grounds that you can’t see grime on something that already looks like a shadow. The other side held that matte is a dust magnet in disguise, that it just sits there quietly collecting a fine gray film that only shows up when the light hits it at exactly the wrong angle, usually right before someone’s coming round. Nobody has won this argument. We’ve just agreed to disagree while one person quietly wipes the thing down every Sunday and says nothing about it.
What nobody warns you about, box or no box, is the fingerprint situation. The gloss ones are worse for this than anyone admits before buying one, and there’s a specific kind of despair in cleaning a vase and putting it back exactly where it was, only for someone to pick it up ten minutes later “just to look” and leave five perfect prints down the side.
The promise is always the same, sleek, dramatic, a bit of contrast in the room. The reality is a slightly greasy object that needs babying more than the beige one it replaced ever did.
It does earn its keep on flowers, though, everyone agrees on that much. Pale stems, anything blush or cream or that washed out sage color, all of it looks better against black than it ever did against the cream vase it replaced, and that’s not nothing.
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One of us switched entirely to buying paler flowers just to suit the vase, which is a genuinely unhinged level of commitment to a piece of ceramic, and we’ve told her so.
The finish holds up better than expected over time, that’s the fair bit. Two years in, no chips, no fading, nothing that looks tired, which is more than can be said for some of the metallic ones that came through here and turned a bit bronze and sad within a year. Knock it against the tap once running water into it, though, and the whole team hears about it, because that’s the one sound in this building that makes everyone flinch at once.
We’ve stopped pretending we’ll agree on the dust thing. What we do agree on is that it looks better empty than most vases manage looking full, sitting there doing nothing, being dramatic about it, which is honestly the whole appeal and also, if we’re being fully honest, slightly infuriating.
