Coloring items with rare mods

I'm sure its happened to everyone - That sinking feeling you get when you accidently sell that +5 insightful +30hp collectors staff to the merchant. My personal tally includes:
2 henge swords with perfect upgrades.
1 Stance Shield.
2 Collectors items with perfect upgrades.
You can take all the precautions you like such as keeping stuff in seperate bags, but occasionally while weapon swapping, they end up in your backpack mixed up with the random stuff you pick up.

I however, have never accidently sold a gold item to the merchant because its text is gold and clearly marked as "important". It would be great if weapons become gold when they have a "gold class" upgrade applied to them.

How about doing what the title suggests and.. just hit 'em with a cheap dye? Or an expensive one, I guess. Just something that'll stand out. Or just learn to sort your bags really well.

Non-snarky answer, though.. hmm. I'd prefer not a gold text, but.. something else, maybe.. red text? After using a weapon for, I dunno, half an hour, or maybe 10 kills, or some easy-but-not-completely-trivial trigger, the text changes to represent the fact that it's not just a piece for sell or salvage.

something like that, perhaps they could add a way to "lock" items and equipment so that you can't sell them to the merchant until you "unlock" them.

If you keep them in a certain pack and either put a quest item before or turn that pack off when at the merchant you won't have this problem.

It is very difficult considering our inventories are so small.

Coupled with the problem of mouse lag sometimes, and such things are just a problem waiting to occur.

I'd like it if Anet, like with trading, flagged customized items at the merchant.

Warning, this item is customized:
PvP Short Sword of Swordsmanship
...

It would be great if we could flag items to not be sellable. It's soo stuped when your mouse acts funny and you sell that weapon or that stack of 180 steel ingots to the merchand
What adds to this imo is that whenever I switch weapons during a mission those weapons will end up in my backpack...where all my picked up items end up also which I either salvage or sell to the merchand.

Sometimes I accidentally sell 2 items and, because there's no message like "You sold a holy staff to Jack [Merchand]" so I end up not knowing for sure wether or not I sold something that was not meant to be sold...

i dont know what i am doing differently but my weapon slot items stay in the right hand corner of my bottom bag.

i have to move them to that spot the first few times but after that they seem to stick in that slot.

example is a bow of enchanting which i only use when a longer skill is wanted and then switch back and it has been there for several switches a day for months.

i also have all bags UNCHECKED so i can only sell from the backpack.

i also have 3 quest items in the first middle and 2/3 positions so i am forced to actually do something before selling.

if i have an inventory so that some in the backpack i want to save i put a standout quest item (pumpkin helm) in front of them to be sure i notice.

the other thing is most important.

I MOUSE EACH AND EVERY THING I SELL.

IF I AM IN A BIG ENOUGH HURRY THAT I CANT DO THAT (PHONE RINGING ETC) I CLOSE WITHOUT SELLING

how about clicking off the option to sell what you are currently equipping, i dont know why you had it clicked on in the first place