What is colour?
7 September, 2021
When I was studying Graphic Design at AUT, my colour-theory tutor Ken Robinson said there was a particular shade of purple that could only be seen while on acid – and it was worth taking acid to experience it. Years later, I lived in a bedroom that had a deep velvety purple wall, yet my mother swore it was brown.
Purple was the most expensive, coveted dye in human history. Tyrian purple was made from the secretion of the Mediterranean Murex snail. One snail produced a single drop of dye. Because of the scarcity of this naturally occurring colour, the Roman emperor Nero made the sale of this precious dye to non-royals punishable by death1.
In 1856, when William Henry Perkin accidentally invented a synthetic purple dye while trying to develop a cure for malaria, societies’ need for natural dyes came to an end.
Author Victoria Finlay believes the rich history of each colour is linked to its name. The word purple has associations that give the visual colour meaning and remind us of its historical origins. Yet the head of Pantone, Lawrence Herbert disagrees and believes that colours don’t need names, and therefore Pantone will be replacing all names with numbers2. In our technology-driven world, purple will be reduced to #BB29BB.
Capitalism is changing how we understand colour. It is leading us to believe that colours are reliable, predictable, and able to be controlled. But colours don’t lend themselves to precision3. Natural colours are cyclical, unstable, and unpredictable4. Colours are living entities, perhaps even their own species, that evolve and fade over time – just as all living things do. Natural colours are an antidote to capitalism's persistent uniformity.
- Jason Logan, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (New York: Abrams, 2018).
- Victoria Finlay, Color : A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004).
- Jason Logan, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (New York: Abrams, 2018).
- Keith Recker, True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes and Pigments (Loveland, Colorado: Thrums Books, 2019), 227.