- MATTHEW TOLES
His outfits communicate a fairly direct message, and on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, he's wearing a sponge-yellow beret, slim-fit margarine-yellow jeans, a short-sleeve button-up cartoon-yellow shirt, foam-insulation-yellow wingtips, egg-yolk-yellow earrings, and gasoline-yellow painted fingernails. Everywhere in his Capitol Hill apartment are colorful stacks of colorful clothes, colorful shoes, and colorful jewelry. "If I'm gonna do the color, I'm gonna go all the way with the color," he says. And this sometimes involves wearing a floor-length coat of thick velvet in the middle of summer, which gets hot as shit: "I just withstand it. I force my brain to focus on other things." He also dyes his hair, beard, mustache, sideburns, and eyebrows to correspond with the month's chosen palette, as well as his arm and leg hair. For this last set, Mark applies the dye with a toothbrush, bakes it in using a hair dryer and a twirling motion, and after, he'll scrape away any stained skin with a pumice stone. The total-body dye ritual takes about four hours, and biweekly sprinklings of two-hour upkeep sessions ensure "the fullest vibrancy possible."