Palais Paar, Vienna, Austria, ca. 1765–72 (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s hard to imagine now, but people once gathered together freely, shoulders rubbing against shoulders, breath exchanged between lungs, bodies open to one another—all this closeness, almost a million people standing in a crowd just to watch a statue get undressed.

It was a rainy October day in 1886 and the Statue of Liberty was shrouded in a French flag. The weather was miserable and the ceremonial unveiling went poorly. The drapery was pulled off too soon (right in the middle of a speech), and the fireworks display had to be canceled and rescheduled. Still, over a million freezing New Yorkers came out (including a boat full of suffragettes, protesting the statue). While it’s hard for me to even imagine standing inside a crowd of that size, it’s harder still to imagine the Statue of Liberty herself, as she looked then. Before she was the verdigris icon, patron saint of many a bespoke paint color, she was copper-skinned. Brown, not green.

It felt like a revelation to read that tiny detail in Ian Frazier’s New Yorker piece on Statue of Liberty green. When residents first beheld Lady Liberty, they saw not an otherworldly, aqua-skinned allegory holding her lit torch to the sky, but a metallic, regal woman stretching upward from a granite plinth. It’s a simple enough fact, and yet I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Brown, not green.

She was brown because that’s the color of copper, an interesting chemical metal that occurs in a usable form frequently in nature. She is green because that’s the color of verdigris, a substance that both is and isn’t turquoise. She’s green because we live surrounded by oxygen and when oxygen comes into contact with a metal like copper, it begins to tear away the electrons, which allows for the copper atoms to begin reacting with other particles. On the coast, uncoated metal can come face-to-face with harsh seawater, a substance that is naturally full of salt—ions and carbonic acid. Thus, the Lady’s metal skin gains a thin, colorful coating made of copper chloride. This crystalline solid appears to the human eye as a light robin’s-egg blue, a turquoise patina, a soft hue somewhere between green and blue.

Statue of Liberty, Annie Spratt, Wikimedia Commons

Next to the shifting and dated definition of millennial pink, the green-blue spectrum is perhaps my favorite color quandary. It’s a surprisingly loaded issue: where one ends and the other begins, and what to call the colors in between. For centuries, there was a myth circulating in white culture that the more words we had for colors, the more colors we could see. Since some cultures don’t have separate words for green and blue, some historians believed that the people who spoke those languages couldn’t see the difference, that their visual skills were lesser-than, that their abilities were less evolved than the cultures that named these leaves green, that pool blue. According to this logic, English speakers were superior because of our words for green and blue—not to mention our words for all those shades that exist in the gradient between them.

Edgar Degas, The Singer in Green, 1884

This is most likely not the case. People’s eyes work mostly the same around the world (save for notable exceptions, such as those who are visually impaired or color blind). The fact that we’re living in an increasingly color-literate world doesn’t mean we’re changing how we see. But we are changing how we look.

Since I became interested in colors a few years ago, I began amassing a mental collection of in-betweens. Colors that didn’t fall into a clear category. Colors that I felt were misnamed or misunderstood. The majority of them fell into the same bucket as so-called copper green. In here, I threw aqua, cyan, turquoise, teal, and Tiffany. I filed away glaucous and Cambridge Blue. None of them are really blue and none of them are really green. I suppose they’re all shades of turquoise, yet that seems wrong, too. Turquoise is a relatively new name. Before there was turquoise, there was verdigris.

Eggs of British birds, Seebohm, 1986

Verdigris is the ur-turquoise. The name comes an Old French term, vert-de-Grèce (“green of Greece”). It is also sometimes known as “copper green” or “earth green,” since the pigment was commonly made from ground-up malachite or oxidized copper deposits. Certainly, verdigris owes a great debt to copper (symbol: Cu), as do the gemstones turquoise (chemical composition: CuAl₆(PO₄)₄(OH)₈·4H₂O) and malachite (chemical composition: Cu₂CO₃(OH)₂). In America, we’re more likely to call these green-blue shades turquoise (from the Old French for Turkish, or “from-Turkey”) or Tiffany Blue (coined in 1845 with the publication of the Tiffany’s Blue Book catalogue and trademarked in 1998) than we are to invoke old-timey verdigris. Yet I prefer the odd old name, with its vivid consonants and slithery tail. The word sounds unstable, fittingly fluid for such a liquid hue.

Image from Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Entwurf einer allgemeinen Farbenverein, 1769

For many hundreds of years, verdigris was the most brilliant green readily available to painters. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, artists commonly manufactured verdigris by hanging copper plates over boiling vinegar and collecting the crust that formed on the metal. This was mixed with binding agents, like egg white or linseed oil, and applied to canvas, paper, or wood. While not all of these famous works have been chemically analyzed, verdigris can reportedly be seen in paintings by the likes of Botticelli, Bosch, Bellini, and El Greco. But like Lady Liberty, who started as brown and lightened to green, many of these works have morphed over the years, their bright hues fading from saturated cyan or emerald (depending on how the color was mixed) to murky grays and pond-water browns. For verdigris is both toxic and unstable, a fact that Leonardo da Vinci knew, though he persisted in using it still. (“Verdigris with aloes, or gall or turmeric makes a fine green and so it does with saffron or burnt orpiment; but I doubt whether in a short time they will not turn black,” he wrote.) It was just such a beautiful color, and so accessible. It was hard for painters to resist, even when they knew it would render their works mortal. To use verdigris was to accept that your lovingly rendered scene would one day sour. The bright cloaks would turn dark, the soft grass would fade, the foliage turn. But such is the nature of cloth and plants and paint. Such is the nature of beauty.

Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, 1439

Of course, it is possible to restore a painting. Sometimes, when a painting is restored, the conservationists use synthetic pigment to retouch areas where the color has faded or changed. This was the case with Jan van Eyck’s Margaret, the Artist’s Wife, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. “Following cleaning the small losses and areas of damage needed to be retouched so that they do not distract from the compelling image and from Van Eyck’s immaculate painting technique,” writes Jill Dunkerton in her report on the process. “The materials used for the new restoration have to be stable, not changing colour like the old varnish and retouchings, and they must remain easily resoluble so that the painting can be safely cleaned again in the future. Carefully selected and tested modern synthetic resin paints are therefore employed.” While in some cases, the restored painting can look alarmingly different from the one we’re used to seeing (like with that ghastly Ghent lamb), Margaret doesn’t. She looks nice after her spa treatment—refreshed and pink. Her green accessories don’t look overly bright either, nor has her headdress been ruined. The National Gallery’s painstaking work paid off, and were Van Eyck around to see it, he might be quite pleased.

Yet there is something uncanny about even the most well-done restoration, just as there’s something strange about seeing pictures of the Statue of Liberty with her original copper coloring. Lately, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly skeptical about the value of authenticity as a goal. According to the logic of our time, it is important to be “real”. What is real? Real is authentic, unadorned, unchanged. Often, the “real” meaning is the primary one. What something “really” means is what it meant, according to traditionalists. This argument has big implications when it’s applied to things like the Bible or the Constitution. When applied to art, the stakes are much lower. But the logic still feels strange. It discourages appreciation for change, for the slow evolution of things. Lady Liberty isn’t “really” brown. She’s both brown and green and gray and a multitude of other colors. Greek temples aren’t “really” colorful; they were once colorful and now that’s gone and maybe someday they’ll be colorful again, if that’s the will of the people.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in Ecstasy, 1480

I’m guilty of insisting on primacy myself, I know. At times, I’ve argued for the real definition of a color. But I also like how colors change, how words change, how material things age. Wood expands and contracts, copper gets weathered by the sea, and words move through cultures. What we call mauve isn’t what Victorians considered mauve. Same with puce. Same with so many other hues. Verdigris is emblematic of that movement. It’s a blue-green, yes. But more importantly, it’s a quality. It is hard to give it a hex code because it’s not flat. It’s a color made from change.

My recent interest in verdigris was piqued by the newfound ubiquity of Farrow & Ball colors, including the saturated teal they’re calling Verdigris. You might notice that I wrote colors there and not paints. Farrow & Ball is a high-end paint brand that has been profiled in the New Yorker and spoofed on SNL. It’s a subtle status marker that indicates a level of refinement in one’s private sphere. The paint itself isn’t really everywhere; I’ve seen it used in some house projects, but it’s not as common as you might think. Being able to name-check a Farrow & Ball hue indicates that you’re in possession of a certain level of cultural capital. It’s also a funny kind of capital, because you don’t have to spend money on Farrow & Ball to gain access to this rarefied sphere. A few interior designers have confessed to me that they use Benjamin Moore dupes for Farrow & Ball hues in their personal homes, since it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference. The paint isn’t the point—it’s the name that matters.

Farrow & Ball paint colors

And Farrow & Ball names are very, very good. Some are whimsical and child-like (like Mole’s Breath or Mouse’s Back), some are charmingly old-fashioned (Lamp Room Gray or Wavet, an “old Dorset term for a spider’s web”); a few are winter vegetables (Cabbage White, Brassica, Broccoli Brown), a few are obviously fancy (Manor House Gray, Mahogany), and many are simply obscure (Incarnadine, Dutch Orange, and Verdigris). Reading through the list reminds me of when I was a child, browsing J. Crew catalogues for overpriced sweaters, wondering what kind of woman would wear a “harvest grape” cashmere shell or a “dusty cobblestone” merino turtleneck. It has the same preppy, old money allure. A person who would paint their bedroom Brinjal (“a sophisticated aubergine”) probably spent their childhood in a house with a drawing room, summering in some coastal region I’ve never heard of, and capering about in child-size loafers. They’re a competent sailor. They have never applied for Obamacare.

Plenty of paint companies have hues named for the color of salt-water-aged metal, including Donald Kaufman’s “Liberty Green,” Benjamin Moore’s “Lady Liberty,” Sherwin-Williams’s “Parisian Patina,” and Behr’s “Copper Patina.” And while once I might have argued that one paint color is correct, I don’t want to do that. Farrow & Ball’s Verdigris is no less real than Behr’s. It’s also no more true.

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, Presentation Drawing of “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” 1875

I like verdigris, and all these greenish, eggy blues, because it reminds me that Tiffany doesn’t own turquoise. Neither do the mine owners in Colorado who are trying to brand their turquoise, nor does the silver company that bought up all the stones from a single town. You can own a stone and you can patent a color, but you can’t own the word or the meaning. The minute you try, you lose something.

Over a hundred years ago, the United States Army began looking into turning the Statue of Liberty back to her original copper color. “As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do,” writes Frazier. “In 1906, New York newspapers printed stories saying that the Statue was soon to be painted. The public did not like the idea.” In the end, nothing was done. Change was accepted, and we let her green skin stay. And like a word moving through years, shifting its meaning, she continues to change, ever so slightly. As an architect told Frazier, verdigris is not opaque. It is “crystalline … you’re looking into it.” You’re seeing a century of change and molecular growth. You’re seeing into the past. There’s brown. There’s green.

Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude, 1917

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the people would have loved her if she hadn’t been spirited away to be raised in France in 1548, but perhaps they wouldn’t have. Maybe Mary was doomed to always be loathed for her femaleness and her Catholicism. By the time she returned to the newly Protestant Scotland at age eighteen, she had spent over a decade in the French court, developing a taste for elaborate gowns and flashy jewels. She was tall and graceful, beautiful according to some accounts, but this didn’t endear her to the common people. While Mary was strutting around in fine lace and velvet and elaborate lockets, her people were told that God wanted them in chaste, sober clothes. Embroidery was deemed “unseemly” as were “light and variant hues in clothing, as red, blue, yellow and such like, which declare the lightness of mind.” Instead, the Scots were told to wear simple fabrics in “grave colour,” such as “black, russet, sad grey, or sad brown.”

Portrait of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, c. 1500s

This depressing list comes from a summary of the 1575 General Assembly of the Kirk, recorded in the Domestic Annals of Scotland. Although the upper classes continued to wear silks and velvets and pretty bright dresses, most people wore their sad rags. It was more practical, to be dressed in dark gray and black and brown. Life for the lower classes was hard. The clothing reflected this fact.

And yet, thrown in with those drab colors was russet. In this context, russet was both a general chromatic descriptor and a specific type of rough spun cloth, colored with a mixture of woad (a member of the cabbage family that was used to make a blue-gray dye) and madder (a similarly yellow-flowered herb whose roots could be turned into a pinkish-brown dye). Russet wasn’t a bright color, but it was at least more cheerful than “sad grey,” it had a bit more life than black. While Mary, Queen of Scots reportedly wore vivid scarlet under her black mourning clothes, her people dressed like dead leaves and gray stones. At their most vibrant, they could wear the color of rust, of dirty root vegetables, of aging fox fur.

Peter Breugel the Elder, The Return of the Herd (November), 1565

It may sound like I dislike russet, but I don’t. Over the last decade, I have learned to appreciate the textures and rhythms of the later months of the year. Russet is the color of November in Maine. The color that emerges when all the more spectacular leaves have fallen: the yellow coins of the white birch, the big, hand-shaped crimson leaves of the red maple, the papery pumpkin-hued spears of the beech trees. The oaks are always the last to shed their plumage, and their leaves are the dullest color. They’re the darkest, the closest to brown. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually quite pretty. Russet is a subtle color, complicated by undertones of orange and purple. Indeed, according to some color wheel systems, “russet” is the name given to the tertiary color created by mixing those two secondary colors. Its only companions in this category are slate (made from purple and green) and citron (made from green and yellow). Like russet, citron and slate occur often in the natural world. Our Earth is a blue marble if you get far enough away, but from up close, it’s so very brown, so often gray.

Unknown artist, botanical illustration c. 1905 (© wikimedia commons)

This may explain why many cultures think of russet and similar dull reds as neutral hues, akin to the monochrome scale of white, black, and the innumerable shades between. True reds, the crimsons and vermilions and scarlets, have historically been associated with fire, blood, and power. In Red: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau explains that, for thousands of years, red was “the only true color.” He continues, “as much on the chronological as hierarchical level, it outstripped all others.” In ancient Greece, high priests and priestesses dressed in crimson, as did (they imagined) the gods themselves. In contrast, the dull reds, the brown reds, have been understood as “emblematic of peasantry and impoverishment,” claims Victoria Finlay in An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour. Finlay files red ocher among the browns—the ruddy pigment used in the caves of Lascaux—which is perhaps where it belongs. Perhaps that’s where russet belongs, too. But it’s not entirely clear. Paging through both books, I see reds and browns together more often than not. They’re close, those hues. A generous eye can see the fiery warmth blazing beneath the brown, the homely walnut emerging from the red.

Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt, 1893

It seems likely that russet, as a word, is an offshoot of red (Old French rousset from Latin russus, “reddish”). But russet means more than red-like, red-adjacent. It also means rustic, homely, rough. It also evokes mottled, textured, coarse. The word describes a quality of being that can affect people as well as vegetables. Apples can be russet, when they have brown patches on their skin. Potatoes famously are russet; their skin often has that strange texture that makes it impossible to tell where the earth ends and the root begins. There are russet birds and russet horses—it’s an earthy word that fits comfortably on many creatures. For Shakespeare, it was a color of poverty and prudence, mourning and morning. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Biron imagines a life without the finer things, without silks and taffeta, a life of sacrifice undertaken to prove his love. The color of his penance? Russet.

and I here protest,
By this white glove;—how white the hand, God knows!—
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes:
And, to begin, wench,—so God help me, la!—
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.

Just a few decades after this was written, in a country not too far away, Peter Paul Rubens was painting with brilliant crimson and shocking vermilion. Rubens was a devout Roman Catholic, a religion that embraced sumptuous fabrics and rich colors. A generation later, another northern painter would rise to prominence: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. While Catholic Rubens loved shocking reds, rich blues, and even sunny yellows, Protestant Rembrandt painted with a far more restrained palette. Many of his most famous paintings (including his self portraits) are predominantly brown and gray. And when he did use color, Rembrandt very often reached for russet, auburn, fulvous, and tawny. Reds that leaned brown, and browns that leaned red. Sometimes, he brought in a splash of crimson to tell the viewer where they should focus (the vibrant sash in Night Watch, the cloaks in Prodigal Son), and sometimes he let soft, misty yellow light bathe his bucolic landscapes. His work was earthy, imbued with the quiet chill of early November.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c.1668

I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood. I’m hunkering down for winter, making paprika-spiked stews and big pots of beans with bacon, always dutifully freezing a portion for later. I’ve been readying myself not for hibernation, but for months of social isolation. According to both the Farmer’s Almanac and common sense, it’s going to be a hard winter for North America. As though inspired by the celebrity fat bears of Katmai, I’ve noticed myself bundling up, bulking up, and reaching for thick, warm clothes in rusty earth tones. My mother always favored a restrained palette; she recently gave me a big bag of sweaters she no longer wants, and three of them are russet. One, a cable-knit wool turtleneck, is from the nineties, but it could be from the seventies. It could be from Autumn/Winter 2020 (“brown is the new black,” proclaims Vogue Paris). It could be from any decade, really. It has timeless mom energy, something I find myself needing to channel more and more often lately.

“Tab details on suit ensemble,” New York Public Library Digital Collections.

I’m not alone. There’s a certain type of influencer on the rise, one that has embraced my mother’s color palette of auburn, terra-cotta, russet, and beige. These seventies-styled babes fill my feed with macramé plant hangers, comfortable linen pants, and seemingly bewitched, bottomless closets filled with eco-friendly, transparently produced leaf-colored clothing. Call them cottage-core or cozy-core or whatever you like—I call them inspiring. These are women who have become very good at figuring out what light makes their small spaces look roomy, what angles make their baggy outfits look chic. They are people who have managed to style their thrift shop ceramics with tasteful stacks of books, chosen for the color of their spines and the way they sit on the shelves. They are people who can make the most of what they have, turn pixels into money, brown into russet.

Fashion by Louise Chéruit – automobile coat, illustration by Pierre Brissaud, published in La Gazette du Bon-Ton, 1913

I’ve been styling my shelves recently, putting this interesting seashell next to that matryoshka doll, picking out books that tell a story of myself that I want seen. Right now, I can’t go into public and present myself. I have to stay at home, stay safe, and save money. I feel a bit as though I’m arranging shelves while America burns around me, but I’m not sure what else I can do. Collectively, it feels as if we are grasping at straws. I read a New York Times series from fashion designers on how to turn pillowcases into skirts and dishrags into handbags. Stripped of our museums and our boutiques and our money, we are now forced to occupy ourselves in new ways. It harkens back to the grain-sack fashions of the Great Depression, dyed with marigold and cabbage, that the United States government pushed on broke housewives. Here’s an idea, they said, why don’t you try and make the most of it?

Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Kompozycja architektoniczna, 1929

I hear a similar command echoing through our current events now. The top echelons of power are asking the lowest to support them wholeheartedly, to play the part of the willing serf, the peasant in russet while they go about in gaudy red ties that gleam polyester-bright on white dress shirts. We’re living in a time of great economic inequality and instability. In the news, there are reports of white nationalist groups advocating for a Civil War, radio pundits talking about “blood on the streets,” and a rapidly growing cult that slavishly begs their messiah to give them a sign, any sign, so they can begin their purge. I disagree vehemently with all of these groups, yet they’ve succeeded in creating a sense of foreboding in me that I can’t shake, no matter what I do. I see the same thunderheads gathering. I share the dread. I can ward it off, for brief moments, by focusing on beauty. The fear is still there, under the awe, under the gratitude, but for now, I walk around outside with my head tilted up, to better see the leaves and the blue sky behind. For now, I notice the shades of brown that have been there long before us and will be there still.

Read more of Katy Kelleher’s color stories here.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of fortunes, the stand of gracious Maine trees becomes secondary to the ground cover below. When the periwinkles are blooming, it’s hard to have eyes for anything else. The delicate mist is an impossibly soft color, like clouds descending into twilight, like the snowfall in an Impressionist masterpiece. It’s a color that almost doesn’t belong here—it’s a plant that certainly doesn’t.

Periwinkle goes by many names. You might know her by one of her more fabulous monikers, like sorcerer’s violet or fairy’s paintbrush. In Italy, she is called fiore di morte (flower of death), because it was common to lay wreaths of the evergreen on the graves of dead children. The flower is sometimes associated with marriage (and may have been the “something blue” in the traditional wedding rhyme), sometimes associated with sex work (because of its supposed aphrodisiac properties) and also with executions. I grew up calling her vinca, a pretty little two-syllable name, taken from her proper Latin binomial, Vinca minor. My mother cultivated periwinkle in our forested Massachusetts backyard, encouraging the hardy green vines to trail over the boulders and under the ferns. I would have been delighted to know even a fraction of vinca lore back then, but I knew nothing except she was poison. I could eat the royal-purple dog violets, but I was not to pick the vinca. Vinca was poison and poison meant death.

This, it turns out, is false. It’s one of the many easy assumptions of childhood. I thought all plants that grew in my yard were meant to be there, and I thought all poisonous things were bad. Vinca—or periwinkle or creeping myrtle or dogbane, as she’s also called—is invasive to North America. It chokes out other plants, stealing too many nutrients for native ground cover to grow. Many New England gardeners do not plant it for this reason. Yet I grow it, partially because I know what it can do, what it has done.

Charlotte Berrington, Vinca Minor

Vinca contains alkaloids, which can be terribly bad for you if ingested in the form of a flowering vine. If you’re a dog and you munch several vinca vines, it could kill you. But let’s say you have cancer. Let’s say its lymphoma and you’re my husband and I can’t imagine the world without you, can’t imagine what would happen if the small, hard tumors nestled around your collarbone took your life. For three hours every two weeks, you go and sit in a room with other patients, other sick people who have lost their hair and their eyebrows. Together, you get alkaloids injected into your veins. You live because there is a medicine made from Madagascar periwinkle (a close relative of Vinca minor) that can kill cancer cells and cure your blood disease. You live because something poisonous can also be healing, an invasive species can also be curative—for a landscape and its people.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Monet, ca. 1872–74

Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears somewhat brighter than lavender, bluer than lilac, clearer than mauve, and dimmer than amethyst. But it’s hard to say with precision, because the purples are strange ones, polarizing, and violets are even more so. Few hues are more beguiling and more reviled than this grouping, the last stop on the rainbow and the tacked-on v at the end of that schoolchild’s mnemonic, Roy G. Biv. According to the scholar David Scott Kastan, shades of violet exist within their own special category. Violet is, like glaucous, a color-word that denotes a certain quality of light. “Violet seems to differ from purple in whatever language—not so much as a different shade of color than as something more luminous: perhaps a purple lit from within,” Kastan writes in On Color, his 2018 book on the subject. “Violet is the shimmering, fugitive color of the sky at sunset, purple the assertive substantial color of imperial robes.”

This latter kind of purple—reddish, bold, saturated—has been bedecking the backs of the rich since its discovery by the Phoenicians, who were milking snails for their secretions long before the Common Era began. Known as Tyrian purple (supposedly for Tyre, in present-day Lebanon), Phoenician red, or imperial purple, it even has a heroic myth about its “discovery.” According to Roman scholar Julius Pollux, Hercules’s dog was the first creature to discover the pretty color hidden under those predatory shell-dwelling creatures (Peter Paul Rubens painted his vision of this event in Hercules’s Dog Discovers Purple Dye). Hercules had been on his way to court a nymph named Tyro, and when he got to her abode, she took one look at the stained dog and asked for a gown the same color as his mouth. Thus, Hercules was granted the glory of “inventing” Tyrian purple. The nymph, meanwhile, went on to get raped by Poseidon. (“And by the beach-run, Tyro, / Twisted arms of the sea-god, / Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,” wrote Ezra Pond in the Cantos.)

Christ, Byzantine Mosaic, 1320

Tyrian purple was a difficult color to manufacture. Thousands of snails were required to create a single ounce of dye. In first-century Rome, a pound of Tyrian purple cost “about half a Roman soldier’s annual salary, or the equivalent of the cost of a diamond engagement ring today,” according to a 2019 exhibition from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. While it was possible to mix other dyes and pigments to create shades of purple, Tyrian remained the most significant color until the invention of “mauveine.” This, too, was an accidental invention, though we have more documentation about the creation of mauve than we do of Tyrian purple’s. In 1856, teenage chemist William Perkin was attempting to create quinine for a university assignment when he discovered his black, tarry mess had a purple tint. He patented the formula and soon it became the first chemical dye to be mass-produced. Samples of the early mauveine dye show it to be a bright reddish purple, vivid and intense. It is a bit less brown than Tyrian purple, but it clearly exists in the same color family. It’s a purple, a true one.

According to the historian Sarah Lowengard, author of The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, “modern American English” tends to consider purple and violet synonymous, “as simply red plus blue.” But that wasn’t always true: “In eighteenth-century conventions, purple has more red (r + r + b) and violet more blue (r + b + b); one can have light and dark violet as well as light and dark purple.”

Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant, 1872

Violet was deeply significant to the impressionist painters of Europe—and deeply offensive to their critics. Kastan pinpoints Monet’s Impression, Soleil Levant (1872) as the inciting incident in the critics’ war against this artistic use of the shade. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” wrote Louis Leroy after his eyes were subjected to the wishy-washy scene.

It’s a painting of the ocean, but it’s a painting about color. It’s about misty gray blues and light violets. The same could be said for Monet’s Water Lilies series or Pissarro’s winter landscapes or Renoir’s crowd paintings or even J. M. W. Turner’s turbulent marine paintings. The more adventurous art galleries in 1870s Paris were filled with blurry landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, tied together by their techniques (thick layers of wet paint applied to wet paint) and their strange, almost surreal colors. To twenty-first-century eyes, these images look ordinary, but critics were unimpressed. Human skin, lamented the members of the artistic establishment, had turned green and purple and orange. Naturalism had been abandoned in favor of these periwinkle monstrosities.

Edgar Degas, Young Girl Braiding Her Hair, 1894

Periwinkle’s first known appearance in English as a color-word was in the 1920s, but it has been in the painter’s toolbox for far longer, nestled under the violet umbrella. Periwinkle is a Modernist word for a Modernist color. It’s a word that has several meanings—in addition to being a flowering plant, a periwinkle is also a type of snail, though not, confusingly, one that secretes purple liquid. It’s a nature word for a color most often found in nature. A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night.

Edgar Degas, Portrait of Giulia Bellelli (Sketch), 1860

While the Impressionists are perhaps the most beloved of the nineteenth-century artist-innovators—their vague flowers make for good merch—there were other movements bubbling alongside. One of these less-remembered movements was symbolism, an artistic practice that predated (but perhaps predicted) the surrealist boom of the twentieth century, combining elements of sublime Romanticism and Rococo drama with Modernist abstraction techniques to create works that were intense, often quite ornate, stylized, and, above all, dreamy. In contrast to the Impressionists, who painted from nature and labored to show exactly how we experience colors in the wild (hence all those violet sunsets), the symbolists thought you had to inject a little unreality in art in order to get the viewer closer to experiencing a universal truth. They wanted to show what love felt like or what madness meant, so they painted worlds that were stuffed full of references to stories and (naturally) symbols. They revered Greek mythology and were heavily influenced by pagan religions in general—for the symbolists, spirituality was far more important to art than naturalism. While the Impressionists (a movement based largely in Paris) and the symbolists (a movement that flourished in Central and Northern Europe) had very different goals, both groups relied heavily on certain colors—chief among them the secondary hues, the marigolds, the emeralds, the tangerines, and, of course, the violets.

Edvard Munch, Mermaid, 1896

My interest in symbolism arose alongside a newfound interest in sunsets. Both of these obsessions were quarantine-born. I once laughed at sunset paintings and sunset pictures—so obvious and ordinary. But lately, I’ve found myself waiting for the sun to go down, timing my walks so that I can be outside then, when the bats begin to swoop around the oaks and the mosquitoes hum around my face. It’s not the golden hour (which occurs about an hour before the sun touches the horizon), it’s the periwinkle window. It lasts only a few minutes in the summertime; dusk descends fast in the north. But for fifteen minutes, the sky is painted with various shades of violet, indigo, and mauve. At dawn and dusk, my tiny little dead-end road becomes another place, quieter than during the daylight hours, but visually much louder.

Jan Toorop, Old Oaks in Surrey, 1890

And after the sun had set, while trying to lull my baby to sleep, I immersed myself in the works of Nicholas Roerich, Edvard Munch, and Jan Toorop on my phone. Unlike Impressionist pieces with their heavy ridges of paint and texture, symbolist pieces seem made for a screen. They’re often flat, with broad swaths of contrasting colors (think of Klimt’s quilt-like surfaces or Gauguin’s two-dimensional flowers). Some of these paintings are a bit cartoony, kind of childlike, something you might see in a children’s book alongside a nursery rhyme. Sometimes, these paintings are heart-achingly lovely. Mostly they’re a bit mad. Naked women dance in periwinkle twilight, demons garden in golden fields, one-eyed monsters rise from a backdrop of flowers, and lovers kiss in a flat, jeweled world.

Nicholas Roerich, The Call of the Sun, 1919

I slowly came to love these images from the same reserve of feeling that I held for dusk. Scrolling through painting after painting felt a bit like picking flowers. Even the sinister pictures, the poison blossoms, were still so pretty. I spoke their language and understood their references. I could see where they came from, what they were trying to do.

Recently, after spending months thinking about this color and this flower, I emailed Kastan to ask whether he still loves violet and whether he had any thoughts on periwinkle. We’d met once at a color-related event,and struck up a friendship based on my color stories, his color book. He replied, writing from a house in Rhode Island, “Periwinkle seems the color of grace, and not least because of the flower’s modest ordinariness.”  So much is changing, he wrote, “but there is always color—it is the promise of joy.”

Read more of Katy Kelleher’s color stories here.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

PHOTO: SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

Late last year, I found myself in a meeting with three other women, and we were all dressed identically. Blue jeans of various washes, clumpy, Chelsea-style black boots with pull-on tabs, parkas (shed over the backs of our chairs), and mustard yellow sweaters. We noticed it and laughed. “This is the only kind of yellow I wear,” said a woman with wispy blonde hair. “It’s the only one that looks good on me.”

Is this brownish, orangey yellow universally flattering? Considering how many people I see wearing it, it must be. (Or perhaps we’ve decided, en masse, that what’s “flattering” no longer matters.) The mustard craze of the late 2010s appears to have started on runways and in boutiques, but it quickly made its way into home goods and other consumer products. You can buy mustard yellow midcentury modern couches from hip start-ups and mustard yellow lamps from high-end designers. There are condiment-colored cashmeres hanging off bespoke hangers in brick-and-mortar shops, and condiment-colored acrylic blends for sale online at Target. It’s become surprisingly ubiquitous—especially for a color that leans so far toward brown. This isn’t a primary, playful, dandelion-bright yellow. It isn’t the color of daffodils or spring or blooms. It’s too murky for that. This is the color of late-summer allergies, well-stocked pantries, and hashtag-adulting. It’s the color of pest-deterring marigolds and over-tall crops. It’s a harvest color, one that normally shows up later in the year, when the grasses have begun to dry and wild turkeys have begun to roam into the road. But this year, instead of waiting for its season to return, mustard hung around. It stuck around through winter and now, when pastels and florals typically get their turn, that mustard stain remains.

It’s getting bigger, too. I first became aware of yellow trending thanks to the powerful trend recognition skills of fashion editor Harling Ross at Man Repeller. Back in 2017 she was calling for all-yellow outfits, and proclaiming Gen Z yellow the heir to Millennial pink. Two years later, both colors remain trendy, with mustard gaining a slight edge. In early April 2019, writer Emily Gould made note of the mustard-washing on Twitter. “What are we calling this color that’s inescapable right now?” she asked. “Mustard? Goldenrod? Gen Z yellow?” The suggestions came rolling in: fair-trade turmeric, mikado, aura yellow, “drybar” yellow, and golden hour, each one trying to outdo the other with tongue-in-cheek, self-aware hipness. The conversation had the tone of a McSweeney’s piece. Funny, but only if you already get it.

Then, just a few weeks later, the newest spokesperson for cool millennials and eager overachievers, presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, launched his website, which was greeted by fans with the kind of excitement usually reserved for a surprise Beyoncé drop. Buttigieg’s official announcement of his candidacy was, frankly, less of a surprise than his design decisions. For this, the biggest branding opportunity of his life, Buttigieg brought in Brooklyn studio Hyperakt. They built an online “design toolkit” where you can customize your Buttigieg gear. You can choose from a limited collection of fonts and colors. The lettering is retro, a throwback to early Americana, and the hues could probably be described as “classic—with a twist.” Or, as Esther Wang put it, “bland, muddled, basic … a perfect encapsulation of his campaign as well as his ideology.” Nestled in this minimally inspired palette, between “river blue” and “calm blue,” is a golden hue. Millennial mustard, critics dubbed it on Twitter. But Mayor Pete, ever the politician and always the advocate for Real America, instead calls it, “heartland yellow.”

Clearly, this is a color of many names, and all of them are serviceable. These days, you can name a color whatever you like, by sheer force of internet clout. But it’s worth remembering that before there was heartland yellow or fair-trade turmeric or even mustard itself, there was ochre. Before we had massive corporations selling the same ephemeral goods all around the world, we had ochre.

Ochre was one of the earliest pigments used by humans, and it came ready-made from the bowels of the earth. While ochre usually refers to a matte gold color, the pigment can vary in hue from light yellow to brick red to chocolate brown (though the name comes from the ancient Greek word for pale yellow, it is now commonly understood as meaning “yellowish-brown”). The pigment is made from a naturally occurring mixture of clay, sand, and iron hydroxide. Sometimes, early humans would take this mineral blend and shape it into old school crayons. (Archeologists believe that the earliest drawing known to history was a crosshatch pattern made with a bit of red ochre, created some 73,000 years ago in a South African cave.) Sometimes, they would rub it on their skin, altering the lines and planes of their faces, transforming their bodies into strange, new creations. Sometimes, they would grind it into powder and add a binding agent to create paint. Prehistoric people in Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas all used ochre to decorate rocks and caves and probably other things that have decayed, rotted, and been lost to history. They painted silhouettes of bison and deer, silhouettes of their own hands, and abstract patterns known as “finger flutings.” Although these early artists clearly had skill—their beastly portraits show a close attention to anatomy and a sense of movement—they usually depicted humans as little stick figures. Perhaps there was a religious taboo against painting images of people, or perhaps they just didn’t want to paint themselves. Either they thought themselves too important or too unimportant—we’ll probably never know.

A bull painting, made with ochre, discovered in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, East Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia, dated 40 ka.

But ochre was important. It was one of the first materials we ever mined. Long before we were digging for gold, humans were exhuming iron. The earliest ochre mine is located in western Swaziland. The “Lion Cavern” was being used by Stone Age humans as long ago as 43,000 years (compare that to the earliest gold mine, which was probably active 7,000 years ago). Ochre wasn’t just paint—it was a way to possess color, a way to anoint the dead and celebrate the living. Ochre allowed early humans a level of control over what they saw in the world. It was plentiful, and still is­—iron makes up 35 percent of the earth’s mass and 5 percent of the earth’s crust. Even though other colors have been deemed too environmentally dangerous to produce, ochre isn’t going anywhere. Unlike mummy brown or Scheele’s green or Prussian blue, you can still buy pure powdered ochre online (red or yellow) for under $10 and recreate the cave paintings in your own backyard.

Ocre de Rustrel (Colorado provençal)

But the material has become divorced from the color name, and you can also buy acrylic paints called “yellow ochre,” which has become the paint of choice for many Aboriginal artists. The longest continuous art practice in the world can be found in Australia, where painters have been using earth pigments for tens of thousands of years, harvested directly from the burnt orange desert. In Victoria Finlay’s book, Color, she travels to the Aboriginal settlement of Papunya where in 1971, following centuries of oppression by European colonizers, a young teacher named Geoffrey Bardon gave some of his students acrylic paints. He had observed kids drawing patterns in sand, and he wanted to see what happened when they had colorful paint. The resulting artwork was unlike anything on the European art market. It was filled with abstract figures (animals and human) surrounded by swirls and dots, shimmering patterns that seemed to move, like a mirage.

Art by Emily Pwerle shown at Wentworth Gallery

The elders of the tribe became interested in what was happening with Bardon and his students, so they approached him to ask for paint of their own. They wanted to create a mural on the side of the school, one that reflected their cultural heritage and their philosophy. Using a traditional palette of yellow, red, black, and white, they created a work called “The Honey Ant Dreaming,” which Finlay says would have been “one of Australia’s greatest pieces of art” if it still existed today. It does not, because it was painted over several times. First, by Aboriginal painters, who believed that the original mural showed too many of their secrets, its patterns and mythology too sacred for public consumption. The next iteration Bardon disliked. It was too figurative. It showed ants, more or less as they exist in nature. Bardon felt that this semirealist image was too much like the “whitefella” paintings that Aboriginal artists created to please European tastes and entice buyers at galleries. The final version was a compromise between the two (the sacred and the figurative), but that, too, was painted over a few years later.

Aboriginal artist Mundara Koorang in front of his work

This story feels both sad and triumphant. It’s tragic that a work was lost, but there are some things that should remain private, some beliefs too significant and transformative to put on the side of a wall. This desire to keep their art “secret,” Finlay suggests, might be another reason why Aboriginal artists till prefer to use nontraditional paints. Instead of using ochre, which can be found easily in the Australian hills and roads (it’s so plentiful that the dust is used to color concrete), many painters prefer plastic-based materials. Perhaps, Finlay says, it made it “less complicated for them to represent their Dreaming stories for outsiders if the materials themselves were not sacred but only represented sacred colors—like images in a mirror.”

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, 1996

Ochre has been used to create art on every inhabited continent (which rules out Antarctica). Archeologists have found yellow, brown, and red pigments applied to cave walls across the globe. And because it’s cheap and useful, artists continued to use ochre for a long time. You can find this subtle, brown-tinged yellow in works by single-name artists like Titian, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Monet, Seurat, El Greco, Cézanne, Degas—the list goes on and on. Sometimes, there’s just a smidge of yellow in a piece, representing a flower, a ray of sunlight, a dried hayfield, or a wan face. But some painters made the most of ochre—few European masters can touch Vermeer’s mastery of the material.

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, ca. 1660

For Vermeer, ochre was an essential tool, one of his seven principal pigments, a list that also includes lead white, vermilion (made from powdered cinnabar), madder lake, green earth (celadonite and glauconite), raw umber (iron oxide and manganese oxide), and ivory black (derived from charred animal bones). Vermeer also used lead-tin-yellow for when he wanted a lighter, more buttery wash. But ochre was cheaper and it mixed well with his neutral paints. Vermeer’s compositions are never particularly bright—they’re quietly naturalistic. He could fill rooms with golden light by adding a bit of ochre to his white lead paint and using it to paint the background, the floor tiles, the area just beyond the window. He also liked to use ochre in his skin tones. He favored pale, yellowish women who look at the viewer silently, their features a mask. Girl with a Pearl Earring is a perfect example of his yellow-dipped style. Using a limited range of colors, he built a composition that rivals the Mona Lisa.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665.

Vermeer and the Aboriginal painters are also linked by a shared understanding of light. For both the famous European master and the still relatively unsung Australian painters, ochre was a tool that could be used to imbue an image with the sun’s power. (“Unsung” is, perhaps, understating it. Even the National Gallery of Australia has fewer than ten desert paintings featured on their site.) These painters, on different continents, harvested something from deep in the earth and made it ethereal, turned it into the color of life, the color of the heavens.

Americans, too, understand the warming quality of yellow. While artists use it to capture fleeting beauty, us regular folk use it to inject brightness into our lives. This is perhaps one of the reasons that semigaudy mustard yellow is so prevalent in the normally staid and cold realm of New England architecture. I drive through Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all winter long on reporting jobs, and I often pass by white fields of snow, punctuated by ketchup- and mustard-colored homes, the sole spot of color in a monochrome landscape. They stand out next to the faded cedar shingles, the gray weathered woods that are so popular in this area. This is a trend that continues in contemporary building (it’s rare to see a new home painted, say, cobalt blue or turquoise in my neck of the woods) with deep historical precedents. The first houses built in the region were often left unpainted, or they used cheap, plentiful colors, like mustard yellow (made with yellow ochre), Falu red (i.e., red ochre), and lead white. From 1740 to 1780, writes Annie Graves in Yankee magazine, “if color was used at all, it was often a simple yellow ochre and iron oxide … mixed with white lead and linseed oil, and applied on site.”

Looking through my color books, it’s hard to find a time period when mustard or ochre wasn’t part of the American color palette. I have a book, Pantone: The 20^th Century in Color, that breaks down each decade by its color trends. As I turned the pages, I noticed something curious. Almost every decade had its own burnt, brownish, golden yellow. The 1900s had Paul Poiret’s bright “yolk yellow,” the twenties had “rich gold.” Yolk resurfaces as Bauhaus design principles take off, and “radiant yellow” has a big moment in the thirties thanks to Leo Baekeland’s glossy plastic designs. There’s a whole spread on Edward Hopper, who used mustardy orange tones to paint his melancholy landscapes and diners, and another spread about midcentury modernists, who used a slightly lighter (yet still brown-tinted) yellow called “mimosa” for their pared-down designs. Perhaps the most famous yellow of the twentieth century is harvest gold, which was popular in the seventies, and frequently showed up in tandem with avocado green and rusty red. The only decade that didn’t really have a brown-yellow tone was the nineties. That era favored chartreuse-y greens and neon yellows, with some Tuscan beige and sage green mixed in (as did the early 2000s).

Seventies kitchen

Even though we’re having a particularly mustardy moment, the color has been deep in our earth and in our history all along. The name you call it doesn’t matter much, though lately I’m finding myself partial to turmeric. Not the milk or the spice, exactly. I have tried to enjoy trendy turmeric-laced foods, including pancakes and lattes (the latter of which is, as writer Khushbu Shah points out, a fancy repackaging of a very common South Asian beverage you only drink when you are “feeling like shit”). Turmeric is fitting for our times. It’s a new name for an old color, but it’s also an unwitting correction spurred by America’s sudden “discovery” of the common spice. Mustard is yellow because of turmeric. Mustard seeds themselves are quite brown. English speakers have been calling this color “mustard” since the 1840s, and this whole time, we’ve been giving credit to the wrong spice. Mustard yellow was always turmeric yellow. I’m all for giving turmeric its due. To this New Englander, it sounds more inclusive than heartland yellow.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

From Francesca DiMattio’s portfolio of ceramics in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue (Photo: Robert Bredvad).

Once you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches. Meadows aren’t filled with blue, yellow, and red wildflowers—they’re home to chicory and buttercups and fireweed. Knowing the names of things also allows you to see and name patterns. You start to realize that those thin-stemmed flowers with feathered, three-lobed leaves that you saw at the florist look an awful lot like the skinny little weeds that bolt up from the sidewalk near your house. You start to see how blossoms with swirls of intricately layered petals can be the sisters of flowers with just five lemon-yellow petals. When you begin to learn their various names, you begin to understand how their roots intertwine, how their histories align, how their mythology has been built, layer by layer, over the centuries. A rose by another name may still be a rose, but a buttercup, when called by another name, tells an entirely new story.

“Coyote’s eyes” is a relatively common folk name for buttercups, and it’s possible this name comes from the simple fact that coyotes have yellow-gold eyes that glow in the dark. They’re one of the first flowers that many people learn to identify, thanks to the old “Do you like butter?” game, which involves holding a buttercup under the chin of a child. If their chin shines yellow (it almost always does—buttercups have reflective petals) then the answer is affirmative. It’s the kind of cutesy nonsense that adults foist on kids and that kids, being smarter than most people, quickly abandon.

Bonnier, Flore Complet de France, Suisse et Belg, 1911

In Terry Tafoya’s tale, “Coyote’s Eyes,” the fabled trickster, Coyote, sees Rabbit and hears the long-eared beast begin to sing. As Rabbit croons, his eyeballs leave his sockets and fly up into the air, perching on a tree branch. “Whee-num, come here,” says Rabbit, and his eyes flew back into his skull.

Coyote begs Rabbit to teach him how to perform this weird bit of magic, and Rabbit complies, with one warning: “You must never do this more than four times in one day,” he said. “Or something terrible will happen to you.”

Of course, Coyote does perform the flying eyeball trick five times and, naturally, something awful happens. After spying the set of little round jelly balls sitting in a tree, Crow swoops down and takes off with Coyote’s eyes. The disobedient rogue is forced to fashion himself a new pair of eyes. He decides to use a pair of yellow flowers, which fit neatly onto his face and cast the world with a golden glow. This, according to legend, is why many people still call buttercups “Coyote’s eyes.”

Willard Metcalf, Buttercup Time, 1920

There are some problems with this story. Tafoya was a skilled grifter who faked his credentials in order to secure a position as a professor at Evergreen State College. He most likely never got his Ph.D. And although he toured the country during the nineties and 2000s as a storyteller and member of the Taos Pueblo, Tafoya didn’t grow up in New Mexico. He wasn’t a member of the tribe. This wasn’t his culture, these weren’t his stories, and that wasn’t his education. Perhaps this is why he told so many stories about Coyote. He was a trickster, too, and like Coyote, Tafoya eventually received his comeuppance. But people do call buttercups “Coyote’s eyes.” That part is true, and the legend is (as far as I can tell) a real one.

Buttercups, despite their wholesome name, are, like all members of the Ranunculaceae family, poisonous. Ranunculacae contain protoanemonin, a toxin that can cause itching and stinging (if applied topically) or nausea, vomiting, dizziness, jaundice, or paralysis (if ingested in large enough quantities). The group gets its name from the Latin word for “little frogs,” probably because these flowers tend to grow near ponds, bogs, and streams. These flowers generally like the damp edges of things—meadows on the edge of the woods, ditches next to the road, overwatered lawns, the marshy area over septic tanks, et cetera. There are over two thousand species covered under the Ranunculacae umbrella, and they like to grow in places with seasons. Typically, they don’t mind the cold (there are species native to Siberia and Alaska), but they’re not crazy about the tropics. They’re also very old. Fossils of Vernifolium tenuiloba, an ancient relative of the buttercup, were unearthed on George Washington’s estate back in the late 1800s. Researchers estimate that these plants lived around 105 million years ago—before bees came on the scene.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Anemones. 1916

While the most immediately recognizable member of the family is the humble buttercup (the whole family is often referred to as the “buttercup family,” which is easier to spell than Ranunculacae), you probably know a few others as well. First of all, there’s the anemone, which looks a decent amount like the buttercup, thanks to its single layer of thin, delicate petals that often glow with a reflective sheen. But while buttercups are known for their sunny hue, anemone are more easily recognized when dressed in white or red. In her musings on the flower, Edith Zimmerman emphasizes the sparseness of its form, writing that there is something “naked, minimalist, and hungry about certain kinds of anemones, like they’ve undressed a step too far, thrown out too many of their possessions, or lost a little too much weight.” In the language of flowers (and in Zimmerman’s personal catalog of symbols), anemones signify loss. According to Greek mythology, crimson anemones first sprung up where Venus wept over the body of Adonis as he lay bleeding out, gored by a boar. (In other versions, Venus poured some magical elixir on the spot, turning his blood into “wind-flowers.”) Another story says that the flower was named after a nymph—the name is Greek for “daughter of the wind”—who was punished for sleeping with Chloris’s husband, Zephyr. The pretty nymph was banished and turned into a thin-stemmed blossom.

“Anemones’ ominousness seems to have cut across cultures,” Zimmerman observes. In various places, the flower has been associated with sickness and death. Some, like the Romans, used them to heal, and the early residents of England carried them as charms against the plague. This was ineffective, as the nursery rhyme points out. Even with pockets full of posies, the inflicted still died, and a handful of petals couldn’t have been enough to mask the scent of hundreds of thousands of corpses.

Hellebore

In contrast to the frail loveliness of the anemone, the hellebore is a rare member of the Ranunculacae family that looks as sinister as its sap. There are twenty different species of hellebore, and most of them are fairly easy to identify. The classic hellebore has five broad petals that encircle the protruding sex organs of the flower. They come in moody colors, like indigo, maroon, and sickly green. They tend to droop downward; if flowers could have slumped shoulders, the hellebore would. They look angry yet exhausted, each blossom a bruised cyclops.

While you might assume that their name comes from the Germanic word for Hades, it’s more likely from the Greek words elein (to injure) and bora (food). Put them together and you get injurious food, food that hurts. Ancient Greek physicians knew that ingesting hellebore caused vomiting, but they also thought it could be good for you, when given in just the right dose. Tinctures of hellebore were ingested to cure madness and melancholia. Bits of hellebore root were sometimes inserted into the ear to cure deafness. This plant was so powerful that Pliny the Elder even recommended enacting a ritual—which was not to be performed on cloudy days and involved drawing a circle around the plant, facing east, and praying—before digging up its roots. Some folktales also associate the hellebore with powers of invisibility and flight.

The classical and witchy myths associated with anemones and hellebores were written over, altered to fit the monotheistic world order. Yule (a Germanic pagan celebration that occurred annually around midwinter and involved lots of drinking and feasting and fornicating) was recast under Christianity as “Christmas.” In Renaissance art, red anemones were used to symbolize the spilled blood of Christ and the grief of his weeping mother. Certain species of hellebore became known as the “Christmas rose” (for those that bloomed near midwinter) or the “Lenten rose” (for those smaller flowers that appear after the spring thaw). In the medieval period, many flowers lost their pagan powers and served instead as visual nods to Mary (lilies and columbine), Jesus (anemone and roses), and the Holy Trinity (white tulips and pansies). In regions where Catholicism reigned supreme, flowers tended to play a supporting role in fine art. They were vehicles for conveying messages about power and fealty, loyalty to the church and state.

Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas -Still Life with Bouquet and Skull

Things were a bit different up in northern Europe. Following the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s, artists were forbidden to depict religious figures. Famous artists painted portraits and landscapes and scenes from history, while artists on the margins (including female artists) turned their focus to still lifes, a more “vulgar” genre (as Twitter user @Iron_Spike explained in a recent viral thread). Still lifes began to really pick up steam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of these pieces included wilting or fading flowers in their compositions. Wilted flowers could represent a lot of things, depending on the species chosen, but often these overflowing vases served as reminders that, well, we all fall down. Even pretty flowers grow bruised and brown, and no matter how much wealth you accumulate in life, you’ll still die alone. We all do.

Rachel Ruijsch, Still-Life with Flower Bouquet and Plums , first half of 18th c.

This brings me to my fourth favorite buttercup: the ranunculus. These frilly babies look the least like roadside weeds, but they’re members of the same family and harbor the same toxin in their stems and leaves. While you’ll spot the occasional buttercup or anemone in baroque Flemish flower paintings, ranunculus were far more common. Rachel Ruysch included them in several of her vibrant oil compositions, as did Jan Brueghel the Elder, Clara Peeters, and Maria van Oosterwijck. Textured yet tight, with pointed, delicate leaves, ranunculus were perfect for a still life. They added shape and motion, and they wilted with a good deal of drama.

Jan Breugel, Bouquet of Flowers in a ceramic vase.

While the sixteenth and seventeenth century’s still-life painters attempted to render their subjects as realistically as possible, the modernists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all about simplifying objects down to their most basic forms. European modernists existed outside the artistic establishment, so it was no surprise that they embraced the low genres, including the still life. Vincent van Gogh is perhaps most famous for his sunflowers, but he also painted wild, messy bouquets composed of various species. He was close with Charles-François Daubigny, a painter of the Barbizon school, and admired the Barbizon painter’s garden greatly. In 1890, he painted a series showing this flowering paradise. Later, when he was recouping from a bout of depression in Saint Paul Hospital, Van Gogh spent hours painting the plants and blossoms that grew on their grounds. Anemones are common in his bouquets, smushed into vases with boughs of lilacs and stems of daisies and roses. Often, the anemones appear as a spot of violet darkness, a purple splotch of pain amid the warm summery colors.

Van Gogh’s contemporary, painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, must have had access to loads of anemones because he painted them often. Perhaps he grew them at his family home in Essoyes, France—his studio was set up at the bottom of the garden. In the early 1900s he painted a series of crimson images, often using the same brass vase as the base for the composition. As the years progressed, they became more and more abstract and the petals slowly melted into bloody bright blurs, punctuated with blotches of indigo. Twenty years later, Henri Matisse would begin his own series of anemone images—their round, childlike shape paired well with Matisse’s early fauvist style.

Henri Matisse, Striped Robe, Fruit, and Anemones, 1940.

Although buttercups show up often enough in impressionist paintings, they’re usually shown in their natural setting. They’re not really flowers people pick and make bouquets from—they look prettiest when seen from a distance, daubs of cadmium-yellow paint loosely applied to green hills. Hellebores, too, are absent in most fine art, though they make an appearance in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue in Francesco Dimattio’s portfolio of ceramics. Hellebores are not as popular as their siblings, nor as plentiful. Buttercups are too common, hellebore are too rare, but anemone and ranunculus are just right. They’re not as well known as tulips or daffodils, but they seem to occupy a similar space in the floral imagination. This is true in the wedding world, too. In the past decade, I’ve noticed ranunculus creeping into supermarket flower troughs and floral displays. The Knot calls them a “cost-effective alternative to roses or peonies” and puts them at number seven on their list of the ten “most popular wedding flowers ever.” You can get a bunch for $6 at Trader Joe’s or you can buy a bouquet designed by Vogue editors from UrbanStems for $149. Anemone are arguably even more hip. They’re hard to find in the average bouquet, so when you do spot an anemone-rich arrangement, it means someone took the time and effort to source some frail, wild-looking blooms.

Vogue and UrbanStems collaboration

I have a fondness for all members of the Ranunculacae family except for the buttercup. It’s a bit too Norman Rockwell for me, though the more I think of them as Coyote’s eyes, the more they appeal. Last year, I planted a dozen hellebore plants along the side of my yard. My wedding bouquet was primarily made of white ranunculus, green mums, and baby’s breath. It was cobbled together last minute by our chosen courthouse witness. That’s what Trader Joe’s had for sale that day, she explained after she presented it to me, out of breath. “I’m sorry it’s ugly,” she said, but it wasn’t. It was mildly toxic and bursting with lore, messy and old-fashioned. According to the Victorian language of flowers, ranunculus means, “I’m dazzled by you.” Even supermarket flowers are capable of saying that much.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

Coral outcrop on Flynn Reef

The color forecasters at Pantone have declared 2019 the year of Living Coral. In the press release, the company describes this orangey pink hue as “vibrant, yet mellow,” providing “warmth,” “buoyancy,” “nourishment,” and “comfort.” Reading the release is a bit disconcerting. According to Pantone, Living Coral can both release us from the grips of “digital technology” while retaining a “lively presence on social media.” This color reminds us equally of snorkeling and scrolling, the company seems to suggest. It’s a natural hue—and a digital one. Pantone calls the color “life-affirming,” a bitterly ironic statement, considering the continued annihilation we’re inflicting on these small animals. 

Coral may be this year’s official color, but its history stretches back to the beginnings of the world. According to Greek mythology, Medusa was once a girl, fair and soft. Her hair did not writhe but rather fell in soft golden waves and her gaze did not turn men to stone, but made them quiver with lust. She was, according to Ovid, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors.” She was lovely as a whole, but none of her features were as admired as her silky blonde mane.

Peter Paul Rubens, Medusa, 1617-1618

But in a world ruled by brutal gods and equally brutal men, women are not permitted to wear their beauty easily. Medusa was raped, violated by Poseidon, god of the seas, in a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. This savage attack enraged the goddess, but she was not angry with Poseidon. Instead, she punished the victimized blonde, turning the Gorgon’s hair into “foul snakes.”

Medusa became a monster, and as we all know, monsters must be slain (particularly if we’re talking about female monsters). According to legend, the hero Perseus did the job. He darted past Medusa’s “eager jaws” and struck her barnacle-encrusted neck with his sword, parting her head from her grasping, winged body. Perseus took the once-deadly cranium as a trophy, and displayed it on a bed of seaweed. “The fresh plants,” wrote Ovid, “still living inside, and absorbent, respond to the influence of the Gorgon’s head, and harden at its touch, acquiring a new rigidity in branches and fronds. And the ocean nymphs try out this wonder on more plants, and are delighted that the same thing happens at its touch.” Thus coral was created, made from the still-warm blood of a rape victim and the soft green fronds of underwater vegetation.

Giorgio VASARI, Perseus and Andromeda (with coral formation), 1570-72

The ancient Greeks did not view coral as a living thing. To them, coral was as dead as stone, lifeless as a ruby or a dirty fistful of gold. Coral was bloody, coral was petrified. Coral was the beautiful remains of a violent victory.

Our understanding of coral has grown by leaps and bounds. The Romans figured out that coral wasn’t a stone, and in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder suggested that coral belonged to a group with sea nettles and sea sponges, “nether animals nor plants, but possessed of a third nature.” In the early eleventh century, Persian scientist and scholar Al-Biruni observed that coral responded to touch, shying away from the graze of a hand. In the eighteenth century, William Herschel examined coral cells under a microscope. He saw that the cells didn’t look like plant cells—they lacked a thick membrane—and deduced that coral was an animal. A colorful, mysterious animal, but an animal nonetheless.

Catalogue of the madreporarian corals in the British Museum of Natural History, 1893

Although for most of human history, we didn’t really know what coral was. We’ve used coral for jewelry as much as we used emeralds and rubies, amber and wood, ivory and bone. The favored color for European jewelers has always been that vivid orangey pink, lighter than fuchsia, more saturated than salmon. While coral exists in many shades (from black to violet to muddy green-brown), the color we associate most strongly with the creature is that juicy hue, which falls somewhere between the color of ripe papaya and a summer watermelon (pinker than one, more orange than the other). This breed of coral is called Corallium rubrum, and can primarily be found in the Mediterranean, along the Italian and Portuguese coasts. It grows in sea caves and shallow straits. In the wild, coral looks matte—it’s only after being polished by human hands that it develops its characteristic shine.

An 1870s pendant of Medusa, carved from coral

People have been harvesting and trading coral for thousands of years. Precious red coral also grows off the coast of Japan, and in the waters around Taiwan. It’s a somewhat ubiquitous substance; the animal seems to thrive in areas where the sea is warm, clear, and salty. Even though coral reefs only cover 0.1% of the earth’s surface, its undulating multicolored surface has inspired legends and myths around the globe, from India to Italy. In Hindu astrology, coral is associated with Mars, and jewelry made from the gem is supposed to help the wearer triumph over fear and adversity. Coral features in numerous Hawaiian myths, and is traditionally associated with one of the four major gods, Kane, god of procreation. The Shinto sea god, Ryujin, was said to live in a palace under the waves, made of delicately carved red and white coral. Pliny the Elder believed coral helped protect men against the machinations of temptresses. In Christian tradition, coral is said to symbolize the blood of Christ (many Renaissance paintings show the infant Christ is holding a branch of coral or wearing a coral rosary, foreshadowing his eventual bloody sacrifice). For Theosophists, coral symbolizes the “world tree,” i.e. the Tree of Knowledge, from which Eve once plucked a rosy red apple, and Adam once ate. Contemporary New Age types still recommend coral for enhancing fertility, promoting inner peace, and helping cleanse one’s blood and bones.

Coral revivalist jewelry suite, Italian 1850s, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Like other precious materials, coral has dipped in and out of fashion, while retaining a stalwart group of fans. In 2016, the New York Times published a piece by Abigail R. Esman on the “soft call of coral.” Esman documents how coral’s popularity peaked in the twenties, and again in the seventies, when raw coral, left in its branch-like form, became a “hot accessory for hippies.” Over the past century, rising demand lead to the destruction of coral reefs in the Philippines, off the coast of Japan, and in the Mediterranean. “Where there were ‘trees’ of up to two feet tall,” reports the Financial Times, “there are now one-inch stubs.” Coral harvesting has transformed wild underwater forests into barren grassy plains. While there are laws in place to protect areas from overharvesting, they are poorly enforced, says Ernie Cooper, director of Traffic (a wildlife monitoring network) and WWF Canada. “Conservation is achieved through government and laws,” he told the Financial Times. “But laws without enforcement are simply advice.” Esman notes that today, “houses like Dior and Cartier continue to use coral in their designs but concern about its scarcity—the result of centuries of overharvest—have led many jewelers to reconsider.” Some jewelers, including Tiffany & Co., have stopped using coral, while others (like German designer Otto Jakob) have elected to only work with vintage pieces.

It may not matter. People are killing coral every day. It happens when you press down on the gas pedal, it happens when you board a plane, it happens when you flick on the light switch. Ocean acidification and climate change are “bleaching” the coral reefs, and a white reef is a dead reef. Since 2016, over half of the Great Barrier Reef (located along the Australian coast) has died. “The Great Barrier Reef was always considered the most stable and protected reef system in the world,” wrote Trevor Nace for Forbes in April 2018. “However, the recently published study finds that even the strongest and healthiest coral reef system in the world is no match for the methodological rise in ocean temperatures.”

It’s not surprising that Pantone would choose a seemingly eco-friendly color (one that Apple has already selected for the honor of adorning an iPhone) while reminding users how much this hue pops on Instagram. It’s not surprising, but it is depressing. Companies always want to have it both ways, particularly as we slide further into late capitalism, a cursed era where supposedly woke corporations can send snarky tweets about capitalism while trying to sell us junk.

I was similarly deflated last year, when Pantone claimed Ultra Violet as the Color of the Year, arguing that it was a bipartisan color, one that had the power to heal our fragmented country, torn asunder by the power of white supremacy, election interference, domestic terrorism, and alt-right radicals (many of whom where, ironically, indoctrinated on social media). In 2017, Pantone named Greenery the Color of the Year, in a move that was intended to spark environmentalist feelings in consumers, perhaps even encouraging design-interested folks to make “green” choices in their purchasing and production, and ignoring the fact that green is one of the most toxic dyes to produce. Pantone has already shown us that they’re willing to pay lip service to the hopes and fears of the general populace. Living Coral is just more of the same. I’m no trend forecaster, no digital Cassandra, but I strongly suspect that this won’t be enough to save the oceans. The world will keep heating, coral will keep bleaching, and we won’t rise to the occasion to protect the substance that we have used, for hundreds of years, as a symbolic shield against harm.

Bleached coral

But perhaps this is what makes Living Coral a fitting color for 2019. It’s a bittersweet hue, the color of dead women and dead animals, magical blood and mystical protection. Global warming feels crushingly huge, its magnitude tips us away from action and toward despair. Living Coral, bright and juicy and happy, feels like a dose of visual hope, whether we deserve it or not. And there may be hope for coral. Scientists are currently working on a project that has been described as “IVF for the reef.” They’re collecting coral spawn (which look like pearly versions of corn on the cob) and using it to regrow dead sections of the Great Barrier Reef. This has only been going on for a few months, so we don’t yet know how the project will turn out. Maybe we won’t be able to replenish the coral. Maybe the hue will exist only in the digital realm, on screens and not in seas. But maybe we’ll be able to refertilize the once-vibrant forests. Maybe coral will flourish across the ocean floor more. And maybe, someday, we’ll be able to quit our addiction to stolen colors and leave this living gemstone alone.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

F. X. Leyendecker, The Flapper. 1922

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers and Oscars-goers. Some time later, in the minds of many, it mistakenly became red—a deep maroon, the dark color of dried blood. Let me tell you about chartreuse.

But first, pour yourself a glass and watch as the liquid, green as the fresh growth on spring trees, drips from the bottle. It doesn’t matter whether you like the taste. You’re not drinking it for that reason. Chartreuse, like other herbal liqueurs, is an elixir of life. A cure-all, good for digestion and headaches, for sleeping like an infant and living until you’re ninety. Even if you haven’t had Chartreuse, you’ve probably tasted something similar. Italy has Fernet (a favorite of American bartenders for sipping on the clock, or so I’ve heard), Poland has Krupnik, Portugal has Beirão, and Hungary has Unicum (syrupy thick, black and bitter—my personal favorite). These strange drinks still taste of strong magic; it’s easy to imagine that Chartreuse could cure you. It’s no absinthe. There’s no sexy fairy on the bottle, no Mucha girl grabbing your arm and asking you to dance. There’s only a sickly acid-green liquid and a monastic stamp. 

The color chartreuse is named for the liqueur. Like orange, which began as a fruit, this sharp and bright shade of green only secondarily became a color. According to legend, and to the Chartreuse official website, in the seventeenth century, the French diplomat and soldier François Annibal d’Estrées somehow came into possession of an “already ancient” manuscript that gave instructions on how to make an “Elixir of Long Life.” “The manuscript was probably the work of a 16^th century alchemist with a great knowledge of herbs and with the skill to blend, infuse, macerate the 130 of them to form a perfect balanced tonic,” the poorly translated website says. D’Estrées gave this precious scrap of vellum (or paper, but more likely leather) to a group of monks living in a monastery outside Paris. The instructions changed hands a few times. It took over a hundred years for the monks to figure out how to properly brew the potion. But in 1737 they finally created a so-called elixir of health.

Over the years, they tweaked the recipe slightly, making it less alcoholic and more palatable to the general public. Then they began to sell it.  This worked fine for everyone involved until 1903, when the French government nationalized the Chartreuse distillery. They expelled the monks, who went to Spain and built a new distillery there. “The pre-expulsion stuff was much prized,” writes Henry Jeffreys for the Guardian. He was introduced to the drink by his “louche uncle.” As Jeffreys relays, the joys of the original version were sung in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. “There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue,” Anthony Blanche, Waugh’s stuttering gentleman, says. “It’s like swallowing a sp-spectrum.”

Traditional Chartreuse contains a spectrum of tastes—spicy, bitter, sweet, pungent—but the hue is singular. It’s reminiscent of the green you glimpse in a rainbow or a prism, that impossibly vivid color that sears your eyeballs. Chartreuse seems to glow.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, La main chaude. 1775–80

Chartreuse (the color name) was recorded in print for the first time in 1884, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, but artists had long been using the intense shade to depict the joys and raptures of springtime. Jean-Honore Fragonard was particularly fond of chartreuse. He used it often in his misty yet bright backgrounds. The sharp green made his soft pink silks and soft pink maidens seem to blush. Van Gogh was also a fan of the lemon-lime shade; Café Terrace at Night uses the hue to heady effect, and the color appears frequently in his paintings from Auvers. From the Impressionists onward, chartreuse was used to depict both green grass and the city at night. Sometimes the shade seemed ominous, but in the right light it could also be read as youthful and joyous.

Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night, 1888

Chartreuse rose to prominence in art; in fashion it leapt in and out. In 1998, the New York Times published an article, “Suddenly, It’s Chartreuse Again,” that included quotes from people on both sides of the chartreuse aisle. Some, like Katell le Bourhis, a research associate at the Costume Institute at the Met, adored the “strident” color. She praised its awakening effect and likened it to “pepper on food.” For Le Bourhis, chartreuse “is the stuff of the 18^th century brocades and fresh greenery.” (Le Bourhis herself could often be spotted stalking about the museum wrapped in silk chartreuse scarfs.) The Times also spoke with “noted makeup expert” Pablo Manzoni, who called chartreuse a “miserable color.” “Nobody looks good in it,” he said. “Because of the high condensation of green and yellow, it is lethal, I repeat, lethal. The teeth look yellow. This is just a deadly thing.”

As Times writer Patricia Leigh Brown explains, chartreuse has played an intermittent starring role in fashion since the eighteenth century. By the late 1800s, chartreuse could be found on feather fans, gowns, purses, shoes, and hats. Then chartreuse was out—the turn of the century was more about emerald green or eau de Nil—two greens that pair more naturally with the art nouveau palette. It returned with a vengeance during the roaring twenties. Prohibition-era partiers wore dropped-waist, vivid green dresses while they sipped their gin-and-chartreuse cocktail, the Last Word. According to Harold Koda of the Fashion Institute of Technology, the 1920s were a “heyday of color.” “Influenced by an Orientalist palette, the era saw a profusion of bizarre, extravagant shades reflecting the headiness of the period—fuchsias, maroons and shades of chartreuse—often used as a foil for conservative, simple silhouettes,” Brown summarized.

Vanity Fair cover

Chartreuse had several other moments in the limelight. It was big in 1937, and again in the sixties. It was a favorite of midcentury-modern trendsetters, including the Finnish furniture designer Eero Saarinen, who created his womb chair (available in “pear”) in 1948. Designers during the hippie era referred to it as “acid green.” The color looks fantastic under a black light, and there was many a chartreuse-colored lava lamp. Brown argues that the “crowning achievement of chartreuse” in the sixties was probably Balenciaga’s fake-fur jackets. In the seventies, as avocado and harvest gold rose in popularity, chartreuse fell away again. That decade was all about earth tones, and while chartreuse can readily be found in nature, it never looks quite natural when used as a dye or paint. There’s an edge to it, and it comes back when people want a bit of pepper, a bit of spice.

My own petty dislike for chartreuse dates back to the acid-green revival of the late nineties. I was in elementary school when it came bounding back onto the scene. The trend was hastened by the popularity of the Spice Girls, who loved all things chartreuse, using the hue on their album covers and in their music videos and wearing it frequently on tour. I remember seeing the color on all my classmates (though we called it by the less sophisticated name of “lime green”). It was the color of Limited Too, a shop that my mother would never, ever enter. It was too gauche for her tastes, too sexy for little girls, too trendy. She hated the neon-yellow smiley faces, the short, bright-green skirts, the tight, ribbed mock-neck sweaters. Ari, a pretty, popular, rich girl in my class, wore almost exclusively Limited Too. I was jealous, and so I began to say I hated Ari’s favorite color, which was (of course) lime green.

I wish I could say that I have grown less petty in adulthood, but I have not. At some point in the past thirty-one years, I settled on an idea of myself, and I am a person who does not like neon. I am a person who likes barn red and Prussian blue and forest greens. If we must go light, give me the colors of a desert, the dusty blushes of Georgia O’Keeffe, the faded sage greens and pale yellows of Agnes Martin. I will accept turquoise, but aqua is too bright. How dare you try and slip blaze orange into my palette—I will revolt.

The fashion powers that be do not agree with me. So-called highlighter green and slime green (two close relatives of chartreuse) have been popular for the past several years, popping up in collections by Prada, Balenciaga, and Saks Potts, and on the willowy Hailey Baldwin, now Bieber. It was even spotted on proto-influencer North West, who paired her chartreuse pant and crop-top set with a chartreuse scrunchie and itty-bitty sunglasses. Like the bright “Gen-Z yellow,” chartreuse has a brashness to it that feels particularly fresh after the pastels of millennial pink and melodramatic lilac. In August, Fashionista asked whether “slime green” was officially “the cool color du jour.” “While not exactly flattering,” writer Alyssa Vingan Klein notes, “it’s fun as hell, and will surely grab onlookers’ attention (as well as a significant stream of likes).”

Some chartreuse selections culled from Instagram

But my pettiness is silly. Chartreuse can be appealing, when it’s on an inchworm or an unfurling spring leaf. What’s prettier than a spruce tip in late winter, or a slowly ripening lemon on the bough? I harbor a fondness for chartreuse in art. I see the chartreuse-rich paintings of Josef Albers and I want to eat those candy greens. The Color Field painters of the mid-twentieth century, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Anne Truitt’s minimalist green columns—those feel like a revelation. Given the right translator, chartreuse stops screaming and begins to hum, singing songs of childhood and nostalgia, periods of growth and joy. But this fondness does not extend to any chartreuse-colored item that I could realistically purchase.

I really adore the other chartreuse, the imaginary one, the one that sounds right but isn’t. You know, that maroon-y red that looks wine dark and sweet. I long thought that chartreuse was two colors—one red, one green. But it’s not. Chartreuse refers only to the acidic green. There never has been a red chartreuse, but for whatever reason, hordes of people hold dear their memories of this alternate color. For some, it is nearer to magenta. For others, it’s a brick red.

This phenomenon, in which people remember alternate histories seemingly en masse, is known as the Mandela Effect. The term was coined by “paranormal consultant” Fiona Broome in 2010. Broome reported “remembering” the death of South African leader Nelson Mandela in the eighties, although he was still very much alive. She claimed that this memory was shared by thousands of people, and was solid evidence for alternate time lines and travel between universes. Other pieces of evidence put forth for this theory include the supposed existence of the movie Shazaam (in which Sinbad plays an incompetent genie), The Berenstein Bears (which is actually a children’s series called the Berenstain Bears), Ben Carson’s persistent lies about his college acceptance letters, and memories of alternate logos for breakfast cereals.

But it seems unlikely that we’re living in a Castle Rock–style world where one can fall so easily into another realm (though it would offer a nice explanation for the chaos of the moment). It’s more likely that these are false memories, fortified by interior repetition and exterior confirmation from others. The human memory is inaccurate, and we’re all more susceptible to outside influence than we’d like to admit. The elixir of life will not make you live longer. Alcohol will never be good for you. And chartreuse has always been, and will always be, the color of liqueur and lime juice, acid and spring.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her.

This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat.

I no longer walk outside in the fall without carrying my fear with me. I’m always a little wary of hunters, but I’m more afraid of the drink-and-shoot types. Every year, people die in the woods, hit by stray bullets or mistaken for deer. And so I wear a blaze-orange Carhartt hat. And so my dogs wear orange bandannas around their necks. And so we nail signs to the trees, glowing, neon-orange signs that tell shooters to stay away, keep off our property. I have no way of knowing whether any of this works.

via California bureau of land management

Safety orange is a color I loathe. Also known as blaze orange, it’s a bright, vivid hue. It’s the color of plastic pumpkins (real pumpkins are a little more brown, a little more gray) and candy corn. Blaze orange is a flat color, an artificial color, and the meaning we impose upon it is utterly human. Blaze orange is a warning. It says, “No trespassing.” It says, “Don’t shoot.”

There is something about every shade of orange that feels secondary. This might be because the word orange arrived late into the English language. According to David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, orange is “the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English.” In their new book On Color, Kastan and Farthing explain that while there are many words for red and yellow, there is just one word to describe the color between. “But there was no orange,” they note, “at least before oranges [the fruit] came to Europe.”

Rafael Romero Barros, ‘Still Life with Oranges,’ ca. 1863.

Before the 1500s, people referred to this color as yellow-red. In “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaucer refers to a fox as having a color “betwixe yellow and reed.” In the sixteenth century, people had begun to refer to this shade as tawny or orange tawny. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that orange as a color really took off, and this happened only because Portuguese traders brought the citrus fruit from India to Europe. At first, Europeans “recognized the color but didn’t yet know its name,” explain Kastan and Farthing. “Often, they referred to oranges as ‘golden apples.’ ”

The word spread, as words do, but orange remains an undeveloped color category. While I can think of many words for green—chartreuse, hunter, viridian, lime, jade—I’m hard pressed to come up with as many for orange. There is pumpkin, certainly, but is that a different hue from regular old orange? Tangerine is a bit lighter, and melon lighter still. We tend to shuffle orange-leaning shades into other categories. Ocher belongs to yellow; tomato falls under the umbrella of red. It’s been centuries, and yet we haven’t come to differentiate between that many shades. Although linguists don’t agree on whether a proliferation of color words correlates to an increased ability to see a given color, I do wonder whether my lack of orange-words means I’m also lacking in orange-sight.

Golden oranges and snow on Old Baldy, California

Yet this is precisely why we use orange for certain things, like traffic cones and hunting vests. Orange screams at your retinas, spooking them into vigilance. According to a post on the NRA blog, forty-three out of fifty states in the U.S. require hunters to wear blaze orange during the season, noting that “wearing blaze orange is not for the animals, it’s for the people. Deer cannot distinguish the color, but your fellow hunters can.” This has been the standard wisdom since the 1960s, when Field & Stream magazine published a piece titled “Hunter Orange—Your Shield for Safety.” It was the first time the concept of “hunter orange” entered the public discourse. The idea was supported by research conducted by Jack Woolner at Fort Devens, in Massachusetts. “Tested under widely varying lighting and atmospheric conditions over three months, 22,346 sightings by 526 men were analyzed,” explains the journalist Dave Henderson. “In the tests, standard reds appeared black in shadowy areas and disappeared under poor light. It compared to yellow, championed by some hunting groups, which appeared off-white (unfortunately the color of a deer’s tail) early and late in the day.” Green was of course no good, for the obvious reason of leaves, and both blue and purple quickly fade to black when the light is dim. Orange was the only color that made sense, and so Massachusetts became the first state to require that woodsmen don blaze-orange clothing during the fall kill.

Whether you call it safety orange, blaze orange, or hunter orange, the color is the same. Unlike the other shades I’ve researched for this series, this color is government regulated. (The color is sometimes referred to as OSHA orange, in honor of the agency that oversees this sort of thing.) Most hues vary slightly depending on artists’ whims, fashion designers’ vision, or even the decade. (Fuchsia, for example, has brightened considerably over the years, while mauve has faded.) But season after season, blaze orange stays the same. It’s a searing mix of yellow and red. It’s a color you probably see daily yet rarely pause to consider. Do you like it? Most Americans don’t. While yellow is the least common favorite color, orange is the most common least favorite color. People don’t love yellow, but they don’t dislike it the way they despise orange. Orange is polarizing. Orange is divisive.

Fenty, Spring 2018

Orange is also fashionable. Every few years, we see leggy models swaddled in bright-orange fabrics strutting down the runway. Like an exclamation mark, it livens up the show, a burst of flat, human-made color that practically glows under the spotlight. Blaze orange feels slightly crass and over the top, a bit juvenile and bratty, reminiscent of the Nickelodeon cartoons of the early nineties. It also reminds me of Egon Schiele’s intertwined lovers, paintings that writhe with the lewd excess of permanent youth. (Schiele died of the flu at age twenty-eight.) I think this is precisely why designers like this angry, horny, intense color. Blaze orange is shocking. It begs viewers to take notice. It’s nostalgic, but in a transgressive way, like trick-or-treating as a newly minted teenager.

Hermès box

It’s also worth distinguishing, or at least trying to distinguish, between Hermès orange and blaze orange. They’re similar colors, but Hermès orange is slightly less saturated. It veers a little closer to ocher, but the difference is subtle. It’s almost the same hue, just placed in a different context. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of this brilliant shade. I look at Hermès orange—and the orange dresses of Jil Sander Fall 2009 and the fuzzy orange knits of Loewe Spring 2019—and I expect to see something elevated, a better, fancier color than the orange of my acrylic Carhartt hat. These designers are creating expensive garments with the most prized materials in the world, cashmere shorn from mountain-climbing baby goats and leather skinned from newborn bulls. I should see a difference in the colors. And I do, if I look hard enough, but the fact that I want to distinguish fashion orange from hunter orange says something about our culture. Because what would happen if we accepted that Tiffany blue is just turquoise, Hermès orange is just blaze orange, and millennial pink is just rose gold? Would an entire industry come crashing down? Or would it matter not at all? Is context everything when it comes to issues of color and class? The only thing that separates one orange from another is the price tag ($12.99 for this hat, $265 for this key chain), the socially accepted meaning, and perhaps the smallest dash of brown. Hermès orange is luxury; blaze orange is cheap. The difference is nearly imperceptible, but only one of them will keep me from being hit by a hunter’s stray bullet.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

“William Wilson” was published in 1839. It is not one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more popular tales. It is not as fun as “Hop-Frog” or as dread inducing as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But it is my favorite of his stories, because it taps into a narcissistic fear, that of the doppelgänger or “double-goer.” The story is about two men named William Wilson. The nominally linked males talk alike, walk alike, and dress alike. The two Williams grow up in close proximity to each other on the misty outskirts of London, much to William the narrator’s dismay, who hates the sound of his own name (it’s too common, too pedestrian) and resents this upstart William for forcing him to hear those four syllables twice as often.

It is dizzying to find someone with your name. I know; I search for them regularly. I befriend fellow Kathryn Kellehers on Facebook, sending out little electronic pings of acknowledgement. For the most part, they refuse my requests and resist my efforts to spy on their social-media accounts. But there is a Katy Kelleher in Wisconsin who allows me to see her images. On late nights, when I feel particularly alienated from myself, I peer into her life, imagining that we share some destiny, linked by consonants and vowels and perhaps a drop or two of Irish-American blood.

William Hooker did not have to look far to find another man with his name. It was a common enough appellation. But the tale of two Hookers is a strange one, for both men were not only contemporaries, they were also both wedded to gardens and bewitched by greenery. They lived in tandem, and they are often confused and conflated. But there were two William Hookers, and only one of them was responsible for the most enviable of inventions: Hooker’s green. 

The better-known William Hooker of Kew Gardens (not the inventor of Hooker’s green).

The better-known William Hooker was the director of Kew Gardens, one of the largest and most diverse botanical gardens in the world. He was born into a wealthy and educated family, and he spent much of his life traveling everywhere from India to Iceland, cataloging plant specimens. He was a close friend to Charles Darwin. He was knighted. His son eventually succeeded him as the director of Kew Gardens, a fact that Wikipedia paints as evidence of both men’s greatness, though it looks an awful lot like nepotism.

The lesser-known William Hooker was six years older than the knighted William. He was never as successful or as famous as Sir William. Perhaps he didn’t have the same advantages as a young man. But he was an accomplished botanical illustrator, and while one William sailed the world, the other stayed closer to home, studying the flora and fauna of London and its suburbs. His work was skillful and graceful at once; his botanical paintings have enough movement to look lifelike and enough detail to be useful to budding horticulturalists. He was particularly adept at depicting greenery, and one day, he mixed a color that would bear his name. He took gamboge, a yellow made from the sap of a deciduous tree, and swirled it with Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment and a color phenomenon in its own right. When these two iconic pigments mated, they spawned a new, complex color, an almost smoky green. Hooker’s green is the rich color of apple leaves, lively and subtle at once. It’s similar to hunter green and olive, though it skews slightly more toward yellow than both of those hues. At first glance, the color looks familiar, perhaps even ordinary. But as you look closer, you begin to pick out the brown undertones, the slight hint of gray. Diluted with water, it looks like late summer, but when the paint is layered thick and allowed to stand alone, it begins to rustle with the sounds of fall.

Hooker’s green paint from Winsor & Newton.

Hooker used this mixture to paint the ruffled, many-lobbed leaves of red chrysanthemums and the lighter, lance-shaped leaflets of the walnut tree. But Hooker’s green proved particularly useful in depicting pome fruits, like apples, pears, and quince. In 1815, the Royal Horticultural Society employed Hooker to paint fruit varieties, and over the next eight years, he would produce hundreds of works, depicting overflowing boughs weighed down by Tartarian crab apples, mulberry-red wax apples, and greenish Quarenden apples. In 1818, he published the Pomona Londinensis, a collection of forty-nine hand-colored aquatint engravings of fruit, considered by rare booksellers to be a masterpiece. Hooker would continue painting fruit until his death in 1832. (In contrast, Sir William Hooker would live much longer, perishing on August 12, 1865 at the ripe old age of eighty.) He is remembered (when he is remembered) as one of the “greatest pomological artists of all time,” according to the Horticultural Society of London. Hooker’s green is still sold today, though it is no longer made from gamboge and Prussian blue. The synthetic pigment varies from company to company—sometimes it leans a bit more toward teal, and other times it seems quite yellow. But the name remains the same, and Hooker’s green is beloved by many artists, who swear by the verdant hue for all their leaf-painting needs.

William Hooker, La Galande (Peach) from Pomona Londinensis, nineteenth century.

I tell you the story of these doppelgänger Williams because I find it utterly fascinating that two Hookers could live and thrive in such a small universe. According to Kew Gardens, some of the works on paper stored in their vast collection are wrongly attributed to William Hooker the director, when it is more likely they were done by William Hooker the illustrator. Did it drive the artist crazy to know that this other William was rising to prominence in his field? Does it annoy his ghost to see his artistic work misattributed to the garden director? Does he find any comfort knowing that his name, at least, lives on, thanks to his pioneering color mixing?

Vincent Van Gogh, Green Wheat Field with Cypress, 1889.

I can’t help but see all of these Williams, particularly Poe’s ill-suited pair, through green-tinted lenses. Green is, after all, the color of envy. Although this symbolic link is often traced back to Shakespeare, who cast jealousy, the “green-eyed monster which doth mock / the meat it feeds on,” as a major player in Othello, it is unlikely that the Bard created this vivid metaphor out of thin air. The link between envy (and its close cousin in discomfort, jealousy) and the color green has existed for millennia. The ancient Greeks believed that both envy and jealousy were caused by an overproduction of yellow-green bile, which would turn one’s skin pale green. While green is a holy color in Islam, it’s not as revered in European cultures. There are relatively few mentions of green in the Bible, leading early Christian scholars to believe that the color wasn’t as godly as, say, red or white. For much of Western history, green was red’s villainous “heel” (to use the wrestling parlance I gleaned from watching GLOW). Red was the protagonist and green was the antagonist, written into the story for the sole purpose of allowing red to shine all the brighter. Red was the color of sin and redemption, the color of blood, sacrifice, and feast days. Green, in contrast, has long been seen as an in-between color, and its unsettled state was precisely what made it so threatening, so disturbing. (To put it in modern terms, red is for valorous and generous Gryffindors, green is for ambitious and deceptive Slytherins.)

Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, 1434.

In the late middle ages, Europeans began to associate green with dishonesty and witchery, possibly because green dyes and pigments were so fugitive, prone to bleeding and bleaching. “As a chemically unstable color, both in painting and dyeing, it was henceforth associated symbolically with all that was changeable or capricious: youth, love, fortune, fate,” writes Michel Pastoureau in Green: The History of a Color. “By the same token it tended to have a split personality. On one hand, there was good green … on the other there was bad green, associated with the Devil and his creatures, witches, and poison.” In this way, green was always its own doppelgänger, representing sickness and health, avarice and generosity, the natural and the unnatural. If a character wore green clothes, there was a good chance they might be a turncoat (their allegiances would change with their fading threads). But green could also be the color of hope, as it is in the famous Arnolfini Portrait, which depicts a young bride with hornlike hair in a gown so green it rivals spring itself. People with green eyes were considered suspect—almost as dangerous as those with heterochromatic irises. Greens, particularly complex greens with gray or brown tinges, were viewed as suspicious or deadly. “It was the color of mold, disease, putrefaction, and especially decayed flesh,” writes Pastoureau. It was the color of growth and the color of loss.

Childe Hassam, April (The Green Gown), 1920.

No story of green is complete without mentioning money, particularly since we’re talking about envy. While some Americans assume that our dollar bills, and the association between green and currency, came first, this isn’t quite right. The U.S. federal government began printing greenbacks in 1861, choosing that particular murky grayish ink because it was durable, cheap, and prevented counterfeiting (photographic printing was only available in black and white, so it would have been very difficult to take a photograph of a dollar and print more). But green has long been the color of moneylenders and debtors, so-called green bonnets. “The dollar invented nothing new in this domain; it only reinforced age-old symbolism,” explains Pastoureau. Still, the U.S. dollar certainly strengthened this association.

Edward Hopper, Chair Car, 1965.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life in proximity to other people’s wealth,” writes Helena Fitzgerald in her beautiful essay, “Green to Me.” Fitzgerald recounts how she spent years working as a private tutor for wealthy kids, moving in and out of homes that were not her own, homes that were surrounded by manicured hedges, gardens, and lawns. “Green was a constant then, a spiraling, crawling, blossoming thing. The worlds of the wealthy are green worlds,” she writes, hitting the nail firmly on its head. Money is green, but so is the spatial privilege it buys. Like Fitzgerald, I have spent a significant amount of time peering into the windows of wealthy families, walking through their gardens and experiencing their world as an invited guest. I’ve seen the way that green reproduces green, how money builds money, how walls covered in ivy function as fortresses for the elite class. I’ve lusted after that life and I’ve grown green around the edges with envy.

Still from Sharp Objects (HBO).

For me, green is a treacherous love, and while Hooker’s green isn’t quite the color of money, it remains the color of my own envy. It’s a haunting color, heartbreakingly familiar and deceptively pleasant. It’s a poison color and a sweet color—an unripe apple of a tempting hue, bound to sour your stomach. It’s the seemingly wholesome color of Goya’s courtly parasol and Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields, but it’s also the queasy color of Hopper’s lonely Chair Car and Hassam’s sad-faced April. And lately, I’m seeing these dark greens everywhere I look. It’s supposedly one of Meghan Markle’s favorite colors to wear, as several fashion writers have noted. I’ve noticed hunter green and Kermit green and artichoke green creeping into my Instagram feed in the form of thick knit sweaters (worn by enviably stylish young women with good hair and better skin), statement walls (paired with brass accents and black hexagon tiles), and even lipstick (a look pulled off only by the very young and very hot). The HBO series Sharp Objects is steeped in murky, aquatic greens, which only enhances the show’s glorious Southern Gothic vibes. Hooker’s green isn’t a name on the tip of anyone’s tongue, but it feels timely, a visual antidote to all the saccharine pastels, the millennial pinks and melodramatic lilacs. I’m tired of pretty things, and Hooker’s green isn’t pretty. It’s better than pretty; it’s dense and moody, a bit wild, a bit languorous. As summer begins to lurch toward its final days, I find myself wanting nothing more than a fresh, green start. Hooker’s green feels strange and singular—the ideal color for embracing ambition and inducing envy.

You can read more installments in our Hue’s Hue column here. 

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

Lorde at the MTV Video Music Awards.

In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The building would be the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. Mascai had already drafted up the shape of the structure. It was going to be a subtly striking building, a fine example of mid-century modern style perched on short stilts in downtown Lincolnwood, Illinois. Mascai’s plans called for a long low-slung building with the main structural elements, like the supporting steel beams, placed on the outside, allowing for extra-large rooms on the inside. Like most design of the era, it emphasized function and comfort equally, with few decorative touches (and certainly no Morris-esque flourishes). Macsai wanted to use gray bricks and white painted steel for the hotel’s facade. But Pritzker had other ideas. The gray, he said, was dull. He was a man with more dollars than sense, and he didn’t want something tasteful or subdued. He wanted to build something that would stand out, that would trumpet its existence to pedestrians from a mile away.

And so, after pawing through the sample book, Pritzker picked out a purple glazed brick. He didn’t pick a deep purple or one of those obscure dark maroons that can read as brown in the right light, and he didn’t choose a soft gray-leaning mauve either. He picked lilac, a shade darker than thistle and lighter than mulberry, a shade that is undeniably purple, even at dusk, even at dawn. 

The infamous Purple Hotel. Photograph by Chris Bentley.

The Lincolnwood Hyatt became infamous. Like bankruptcy or falling in love, this happened both gradually and then all at once. At first, the hotel was a respectable entry in a respectable chain, but soon, the lilac exterior began to work its magic. It went from being a Hyatt to a Radisson to a Ramada, until it was finally granted the right to go by its true name and was rechristened “the Purple Hotel.”

“It stands out,” said Gwen Macsai, John Macsai’s daughter, on an episode of 99% Invisible, “depending on how you look at it, like a prized jewel or a sore thumb.” The famous and the wealthy slumbered behind the glazed lilac bricks, people like Barry Manilow, Perry Como, and Michael Jordan. The decor, which was swank for the sixties, soon began to look dated, seedy, and rundown. By 1983, its reputation was already in the gutter, but the murder of the known mafioso Allen Dorfman in the parking lot sealed the hotel’s fate. By the dawn of the new millennium, the “hotel was synonymous with sleaze,” Ken Fager writes at American Urbex. “Police were frequently summoned to the hotel for drug and prostitution related offenses.” It was the home of the Midwest Fetish Fair and Marketplace convention, and it became a favorite tryst spot for philandering politicos. The Purple Hotel closed in January 2007 due to health-code violations. Despite some efforts to save the building, it was demolished a few years later.

Vincent van Gogh, Lilac Bush, 1889.

Depending on whom you ask, the lilac facade was hideous or cool, chic or ugly chic, sordid or whimsical, or as tacky as a gold-plated toilet. I love the story of the Purple Hotel partially because I think ugliness is underrated but also because it’s such a purple tale. What other color sparks such divisive reactions? What other color seems at once so unfitting for a chic hotel and so destined to pique interest?

Lilac is a color choice that always feels slightly suspect. There is a time and a place for green, blue, yellow, and red. These primary and secondary colors each have an established role in the world of design and consumer goods. Cars look good in red, and houses look nice painted yellow. Blue is a good color for bedding, and green is a fine color for a sofa, a kitchen, or a travel mug. If you show up to a party wearing a blue tie, no one questions your taste; blue is a default, a near-neutral. Pink has slowly inchwormed its way into neutral territory. But purple has never made that move. It can’t. It’s too singular. Purple outfits are for pimps or bested politicians trying to signify unity, and purple cars are for radio DJs trying to jump-start some brand recognition. It’s a color associated with spirituality, creativity, and royalty, sure, but purple (and bright purple especially) is also the color of kookiness and wacky aunts.

Murex snails.

Within the purple color family, there are clear winners and losers. Tyrian purple (aka royal purple) is the king of the bunch. Its reign is long-lasting and dates back to the ancients. As early as 1570 B.C., coast-dwelling Phoenicians figured out that they could milk murex snails to produce a purple secretion, which they used to dye their clothes an intense violet shade. Centuries later, Cleopatra’s servants would spend hours massaging predatory sea snails for the luxury-loving queen. Tyrian purple was prized by the Romans, and in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes at great lengths the process of extracting the “juice,” boiling down the dye, and submerging the wool. This mollusk-based color was so expensive and difficult to make that it naturally became associated with royalty and, later, clergy members. Although typically seen as a vivid and bold color, Tyrian purple dye could also be used to make lilac gowns and lavender togas, depending on the strength of the dye.

For those who couldn’t afford murex-based dyes, there was always archil. Made from lichen, this was the poor man’s purple. It was redder than Tyrian purple, and producing this bright color involved seeping the plant in buckets of stale urine for weeks. According to some sources, the use of archil in dye predates Tyrian purple. Archil’s popularity spread throughout Europe, and even the Vikings got on board—it’s strange to imagine them raping and pillaging while wearing bright fuchsia tunics, but it seems likely that they did. People still make archil today, but it’s a hobby mostly reserved for plant nerds and dye-hards. And of course, no history of purple is complete without at least a mention of mauve, the revolutionary compound accidentally discovered in 1859 by the chemist William Henry Perkin—but that’s a story for another day.

Whither lilac? you may be asking. Well, lilac is the redheaded stepchild of the purple family. It’s not bright like amethyst or chic like mauve. It’s the color of doomed hotels, Nantucket in the off-season, dentistry, Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, and Victorian half mourning. But right now, after decades of gray dominance and a few years of millennial-pink madness, both lilac and lavender (that slightly grayer herbal hue) are suddenly in the limelight.

Some trendy lilac clothes.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where one color starts and another begins, which is perhaps why millennial pink is such an appealing color term. It’s a catchall for a trend, one promoted and seemingly coined by the Cut. A few weeks ago, the same site posted a fun and useful guide to dressing in “melodramatic purple,” inspired by Lorde’s MTV Video Music Awards gown. Melodramatic purple is a term that stretches to fit mauvy lavenders and pink-leaning lilacs. It’s also a color that, as the name suggests, vibrates with emotional resonance. Emilia Petrarca writes that it has “all the feels … In simple terms, it’s both sad and happy at the same time, a state of being I think a lot of people can relate to for spring 2018.”

Władysław Czachórski, A Lady in a Lilac Dress with Flowers, c. 1880.

In the nineteenth century, widows wore lilac when they were almost done memorializing the loss of their husbands. In both the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mourners were bound by strict rules of etiquette. For the first phase, they would wear black wool dresses trimmed with crepe. “Neither velvet, satin, nor plush can be worn in mourning,” Collier’s Cyclopedia prescribes in 1901. After a full year had passed, the bereaved could wear white, lilac, and lavender, as well as more decadent fabrics. Fortunately, according to Collier’s, if it was your mother-in-law who had passed, you had to wait only one month before getting out the lilac gown.

Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels.

While my mother-in-law is still very much alive, I deeply relate to both the feeling of being in half mourning and the desire to wear lilac. At first, I was resistant to the purple color creep, which started this year with Pantone’s Ultra Violet and subtly spread through repeated exposure in spring 2018 runway shows. The stylized beauty and “claustrophobic elegance” of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread helped seal the deal. Media coverage has been a factor too. InStyle UK credited the designer and former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham with starting the trend, dubbing lilac the “color of SS2018.” (That’s spring-summer, for those uninitiated in fashion speak.) Balenciaga also came out swinging for lilac—their spring-summer line even makes the case for light-purple menswear. Refinery 29 named purple one of the “six color trends we’re buying this spring,” and Who What Wear argued that light purple is the “one 2018 trend you can’t ignore.” But perhaps my biggest point of reference has been Stormy Daniels and her lilac suits. Here’s a woman who has bared everything for the sake of her country (and to defend her reputation), striding bravely into a courtroom to take down a bunch of crooks. For this triumphant yet tragic moment, she chose to wear lilac, a bipartisan shade (neither Democrat blue nor Republican red) with a distinctly feminine twist. The whole sordid Trump-Daniels story has been entertaining for some, but at its core, it’s really just melodramatic. And yet like a bruise I just can’t stop pressing, I can’t seem to look away from this painful spectacle. The country is stuck in a phase of half mourning, and what better shade to wear than a moody pastel, half hopeful, half gaudy?

Read more in our Hue’s Hue series.

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.