We are about to start one with gray mosaic and considered going without the border, ourselves, but we were talked out of it. The rationale was that without the border, you see fading much earlier, because the waterline is always in the separate border pattern. If there is no border, we were told that you would see the fading at the waterline much easier, and the liner would look older much faster. Not sure if that is true, but we were shown a couple of older liner pictures and it seemed to be accurate. We really love this liner, though.