How Do You Describe Color?
Color affects us all in profound ways. But putting it into words is not so easy.
In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep’s character chides her young assistant for not appreciating the subtle permutations of the color blue. It’s a classic scene that intends to illustrate how trivially many of us regard color. And how blithely unwitting we are to the influences that motivate us to choose a sky blue cerulean sweater over turquoise or some other nearby slice of the color spectrum.
If you believe this fictionalized fashion guru, our color choices are not our own. Even the lowliest department store clearance bin is stocked with fabric colors that trickled down from the creative oeuvres of Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs, Chanel, and other top tier designers of the fashion industry.
Well, maybe.
I’m not as interested in who should be credited with influencing my color preferences as I am in finding the right words to describe a color with the justice it deserves, particularly when the flower, or bird, or sunset isn’t around to speak for itself. Cop-out adjectives like pale orange, soft pink, or dull violet are too relative. Hyphenated hybrids such as blue-green are a little better, but only if there is a color wheel handy to see the blend first hand.
Worst of all is the use of the suffix ish, as if a nurse reports, “The patient looks bluish.” This tells the doctor that the patient isn’t jaundiced or sunburned, but says little about whether he is choking or dead.
Color is emotional, therapeutic, evocative — even manipulative — and it only seems fair to choose descriptive words that honor its hold on us. I would rather hear a wide-eyed three-year-old describe a hedgehog flower as simply purple, than to listen to an adult take the lazy low road and say, “It’s kind of lightish-lavender, you know?”
A popular bumper sticker seen around mining communities in Arizona reads, If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined. Up until the early 1900’s, when chemically produced pigments became widely available, this same slogan could have applied to the entire worldwide colorant industry. Pigments up to that point were derived from a short list of minerals, plants, and animals, and were bland and unsaturated compared to the modern aniline dyes of today.
In the middle ages, centuries before Rit Dye, Sherwin-Williams, and Peter Max, no one used the words subdued or muted to expand on the drab color of the leather and burlap that covered their backs. With no modern-day context, the words went nowhere, and were as redundant as saying water is wet.
The primary colors were all represented but had Neanderthal-sounding names that were identical whether grunted or spoken: woad (Isatis tinctorum), was the predominant source of blue, and most yellows came from weld, (Reseda luteola).
Reds were particularly valuable and hard to come by. Before contact with the new world, madder (Rubia tinctorum), was the major source of red pigment in Europe. In the sixteenth century, cochineal, the familiar masses of white fuzz that are found on the pads of prickly pear cactus throughout Arizona, first became available.
Cochineal is a tiny scale insect that produces a carmine red color (from carminic acid) when crushed. It was brought to the Old World from Mexico by the Spanish, and was cultivated for several centuries throughout the New and Old World as the most important commercial source of the color red.
Just as television was much simpler to watch before streaming, we are now bombarded with a barrage of pigment variations in both the physical and digital world that have made color as intimidating as it is liberating. Lighted racks of paint swatches cover walls in every paint department. From black to white and every color in between; if Behr doesn’t have what you’re looking for, then Dutch Boy probably does.
The paint industry has tried to remedy the modern-day plague of too many choices by pairing their colors with names that help to bring the colors alive. Evocative names, like Serengeti Sand, Chopstick, Belgian Waffle, and Cypress Sage, have become as integral to imparting emotion into a color as the color itself, and can often seal the deal when dithering between closely related swatches.
Why call a Lantana flower orangish-red, when it’s clearly the color of Mango Sherbet? Either Victorian Garnet, Gothic Red, or Plum Cabaret would paint a more vivid picture of “that darkish red rose in the Herb Garden.” Gradations of yellow might run the gamut of Limoncello to Curry Gold, and a delicate light green could be better interpreted as Moroccan Sea or Celery Stick.
The names are as limitless as the colors that inspire them. It’s up to us to pick just the right one.
