A Brief, Strange History of Colour

We pick colours now by dragging a slider. For most of history, a colour could cost a fortune, poison its wearer, or simply not have a name yet. Here are a few short, strange stories from the long human effort to make and name colour.

Purple was worth more than gold

That deep reddish-purple the Romans called Tyrian purple came from sea snails — specifically a gland in the murex, thousands of them per garment. Thousands. It was so laborious to extract, and so gloriously colourfast, that it cost more by weight than gold. That's why purple became the colour of emperors: not because it "meant" royalty, but because almost nobody else could afford a single robe of it. The meaning came later, wrapped around the price tag.

"Orange" borrowed its name from the fruit

Here's one that rewires how you think about naming. In English, the fruit came first and the colour came second. Before oranges arrived in Europe, the hue we now call orange was usually described as a kind of yellow-red. The word we use for it — orange — is simply the fruit's name, promoted to a colour. Which is why, unlike red or blue, it has no older native word: the colour waited around for something to call it.

Some greens could kill you

Victorians fell in love with a brilliant green — and it happened to be made with arsenic. Scheele's green and its cousins coloured wallpaper, dresses, artificial flowers and children's toys, all while quietly shedding poison. Damp rooms papered in the stuff could turn genuinely dangerous. It's a useful reminder that "vivid" and "safe" were not always the same purchase, and that a lot of colour history is also a history of chemistry going wrong.

The blackest black started a feud

Jump to the present. A material called Vantablack, engineered from tiny carbon tubes, absorbs almost all visible light — objects coated in it look like holes cut out of reality. When one artist secured exclusive rights to use it in art, another responded by making the "pinkest pink" available to everyone except him, and later released his own super-black paints to the public. A very modern squabble over who gets to own a colour — a question the murex-fishers would have found familiar.

Why any of this matters

Because it puts the tools in perspective. Every hue you can now summon instantly was, at some point, a rare craft, a chemical gamble, or a colour without a word. The slider is the miracle. When you drag one in the Picker and copy a value in a heartbeat, you're doing casually what once took snails, mines and no small amount of luck.

Common questions

Why was purple associated with royalty?

Because the original purple dye, made from murex sea snails, was extraordinarily expensive — only rulers could afford it, so the colour became a marker of status.

Did the colour orange come before the fruit?

The other way around. In English the fruit's name came first, and the colour took its name from the fruit.

Colour used to be scarce, precious and occasionally toxic. Now it's a drag and a click. Go enjoy the abundance — start pulling colours with the Picker or spin up a whole palette in the Palette Generator.