Humans love color. It affects our moods, attracts our attention, defines our culture. We use it in our national identities, and we’ll spend weeks agonizing over swaths of it for our kitchen. Our visual sense is often our strongest, and color has been an important part of our existence from our very earliest history. Sometimes a color can change the world, for good or for evil, or be associated with some of our greatest events or customs.

10Color-Coded Saints Changed The Meaning Of Blue

In 431, the Catholic Church assigned color to its various saints, with Mary the mother of Jesus receiving the color of blue. Blue was an expensive and rare dye, perfect for religious use. Over time, Mary’s blue became what we’d recognize today as navy blue, and its association with Mary meant blue took on a meaning of trustworthiness and innocence and also led to its use in police and military uniforms.

With time, that color is now associated with authority (or even authoritarianism) more than it is with Mary or trustworthiness. Because of this, the United Nations specifically adopted a lighter shade of blue when it designed uniforms for its peacekeeping troops.

9Color Tv Changed American Politics

In 1976, the NBC network, which was the first fully colored network, chose a color-coded, illuminated map used to distinguish which states had voted for which party in the presidential race: blue if the states had voted for Republican Gerald Ford and red if for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Eventually, other networks used similar devices, but in the 1980 election, there was no standard. On one channel Reagan voting states would be blue, but on others red.

It wasn’t until the heated 2000 election, when calling a state for either candidate was a long and suspenseful process, that a standard color scheme developed across the board. Red was assigned to Republican candidate George W. Bush and blue to the Democratic candidate Al Gore. “Red states” and “blue states” were born, and those monikers have been used increasingly ever since in the American political landscape.

8Purple Proof Of Royalty

In the Mediterranean, a sea snail, Bolinus brandaris, has a mucus that can be used to produce a purple dye. It would take some 250,000 poor sea snails to make just one ounce of this purple. Yet this was the only source of purple dye in the ancient world, so the color was very expensive. A pound of purple wool cost more than an average year’s wage at the time. It became status symbol for the rich and powerful. Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Persia all associated the color with royalty. Purple was prized greatly in the Byzantine Empire, where rulers wore purple, signed edicts in purple ink, and even their children were considered “born in the purple.”

The association continued to England, where during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it was forbidden for anyone not in the immediate royal family to wear the color. This monopoly mostly continued until 1856, when an 18-year-old chemist named William Henry Perkins accidentally created a synthetic purple dye while trying to make an anti-malaria drug. For thousands of years, purple defined governments and status, divine right, and rulership, and now, we can casually throw on a purple scarf before jogging to the corner shop.

7Pink As A Color Of Support

Pink as a symbol for the fight against breast cancer can be traced back to a different color entirely. It began with a yellow ribbon used by Penny Laingen as a symbol of awareness and support for her husband during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. A decade later, an activist group called Visual AIDS used a red ribbon as a way to raise similar awareness and support. From there, every charity used their own color of ribbon to support different causes, so much so that The New York Times labeled 1992 as the “Year of the Ribbon.”

One important result was the Pink Ribbon as a symbol in raising awareness of and support for those suffering through breast cancer. In many ways, it is the most successful movement of its kind, and its footprint can be seen the world over. Firefighters are wearing pink, the NFL is sporting the color, and even moving trucks and cranes are painted.

6Orange Varnish Makes Music Worth Millions

Antonio Stradivari is perhaps the most well-known instrument maker in history. From the late 1600s to the early 1700s, he crafted some of the most beautiful and sought-after instruments ever made. Some of his work sells for tens of millions at auction.

One defining feature of his violins is the brilliant orange varnish used in their construction. While it would be an oversimplification to attribute the quality of a Stradivari violin solely to the varnish, it has long been thought that his unique varnish provided a critical piece to the puzzle. More evidence of his talent lies in the recent discovery that his orange varnish recipe contains common materials, easily available to other instrument makers of the time. Yet none of his peers’ work remains as timeless and unforgettably beautiful as the music made from the orange violins of Stradivari.

5International Orange Defines A City

In the 1930s, bridges were traditionally black, gray, or maybe silver to spice things up. But things were changing in San Francisco. The largest suspension bridge ever built was being constructed over the Golden Gate Strait, and the consulting architect on the project Irving Morrow, who designed the bridge’s iconic styling and lighting, also had a thought on the color.

“The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the greatest monuments of all time.” He said, “Its unprecedented size and scale, along with its grace of form and independence of conception, all call for unique and unconventional treatment from every point of view. What has been thus played up in form should not be let down in color.”

Inspired by the red steel primer used on the project, Morrow began extensive color studies with engineers, painters, sculptors, and other architects. The result of this collaboration was the color International Orange. The orange has come to define one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world, as well as the city it resides in.

4Yellow Topples A Tyrant

Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorial rule of the Philippines was resisted by opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, whose favorite color was yellow. When Ninoy Aquino was shot and killed in 1983, his supporters took their cue from the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” and used yellow ribbons as a memorial and show of support all around the airport where he died.

From then on yellow became the color of the revolution. The opposition united behind Ninoy’s widow Corazon Aquino, who wore a yellow dress while campaigning against Marcos. When warned that this yellow dress made her an easy target, she replied, “When Ninoy died, I lost my fear.” From there, yellow began appearing in everything associated with the revolution: T-shirts, banners, flags, caps, and even toilet paper sported the common color.

More and more elements of the military and government backed Aquino, and the entire movement culminated in a three-day rally of some two million participants. Eventually, support for Aquino reached a point where Marcos was forced to cede control of the government and leave the country. Aquino was elected president in 1986. During the entire revolution, not a single shot was fired. Though formally called the People’s Party Revolution, another popular name is the Yellow Revolution.

3White’s Role In Combat

In the Second Punic War between the Roman and Carthaginian Empires, a Carthaginian ship was reported to display white wool and olive branches to signal its wish to surrender. This practice continued into 69, where a white banner was again used to broadcast a wish to parley in the Second Battle of Cremona. Soon, the white flag became well established in the Western world as a sign of surrender. Interestingly, the practice also arose independent of the West in the first to third century in China during the Eastern Han Dynasty.

Though often used as a sign of surrender, the white flag has also been used to indicate non-combatants, such as medieval Heralds, who carried white standards to make sure they weren’t mistaken for soldiers. The white flag has become so predominate in the world stage that many treaties and countries have forbade its misuse and defined such abuse as a war crime.

2A Morbid Brown Creates Cultural Heritage

Masterpieces of art such as The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones and Martin Drolling’s L’interieur d’une cuisine share a disturbing fact in common. Both were painted using dead people.

By the 16th century, the export and misuse of mummies had become a thriving business. The corpses were used as attractions or ground into powder for medicine or even as paint. “Mummy Brown” was used for centuries and was still produced even as recently as 1964. As a paint, it received mixed reviews. Some claimed, “it flows from the brush with a delightful freedom and evenness” and provides “thin films that are extremely lovely and enjoyable,” while others held the practice to be distasteful.

Those in disgust seemed to be the majority. When Edward Burne-Jones learned of the grisly origin of his paint, his widow reported, “he left us at once, hastened to the studio, and returning with the only tube he had, insisted on our giving it decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored in the green grass at our feet, and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it.”

1A Green Poisoned Napoleon Bonaparte

The cause of Napoleon’s death has been hotly debated. Was it a stomach ulcer? Arsenic exposure? Evidence for the latter can be found when studying samples of the wallpaper of Longwood, Napoleon’s prison home while in exile.

In the 18th century, a new pigment of green was devised and named Scheele’s Green, after its creator. This pigment made heavy use of arsenic and was present in the wallpaper Napoleon was surrounded by in his final years. Both samples of the wallpaper and Napoleon’s own hair have been tested and found to contain arsenic. In a high temperature, damp room, the wallpaper could well release enough arsenic to account for what was found in Napoleon’s hair, but we’ll never say for sure if it was the color green that killed him.

You may think that you can use any color that you want. But there are some colors that can be very hard to get your hands on. Whether they’re toxic, outdated, illegal, or copyrighted, there are some colors that are simply off-limits.

Top 10 Little-Known Facts About Color

10 Mummy brown

In the 16th century, a new shade of brown paint started appearing in European art called “Mummy Brown”. You may think this is simply a creative name, but in fact, this paint was actually made of real crushed ancient Egyptians. In the 19th, “Egyptomania” spread across Europe and the United States, as people used mummies as decor, medicine, paper, and even party games at mummy unrolling events.^[1] The exact technique for preparing the color varied quite a bit, and today it is almost impossible to tell if a painting used the substance through any kind of analysis, but all of its variations included actual mummy.

But not everyone even knew what the paint was really made of. When one painter, Edward Burnes-Jones, found out the true origins of the material he had been using he held an impromptu funeral for the mummy in his backyard.^[2] But much like ancient Egypt itself, the reign of the color had to come to an end. In 1964, the creator of mummy brown paint reported that they had run out of mummies, saying “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere but not enough to make any more paint”.^[3] If you want to recreate the shade today, you might have some trouble getting the materials.

9 Vantablack

Vantablack is one of the darkest colors known to mankind. Developed by British company Surrey NanoSystems in the early 2000s, it can absorb 99.965% of visible light.^[4] It held the Guinness World Record for darkest man-made substance until a material with a much less catchy name known as “dark chamaleon dimers” knocked it out of the top spot in 2015.^[5] It can be used to keep light out of telescopes and infrared cameras and potentially collect solar energy. It may also have military applications, such as intense camouflage.^[6]

However, if you use vantablack paint to make a modern art piece or decorate your bedroom, you will probably be out of luck. Unless your name is Anish Kapoor, of course, because he holds the exclusive licensing to use the product in art. Kapoor, who is well-known for creating the bean-shaped “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Chicago, has received sharp criticism for trying to keep an entire color to himself. Fellow artist Stuart Semple hit back by creating several other colors, including “Pinkest Pink”, “Black 2.0”, “Black 3.0”, and “Diamond Dust”, which every single person in the world is allowed to use… except Anish Kapoor.^[7] Massachusetts company NanoLab also created a similar substance to Vantablack known as Singularity Black which is available for the public, so if you really want something to be as dark as possible, you can give them a call.^[8]

8 Tyrian Purple

Royal purple hues have been associated with nobility for centuries and the connection lingers to this day. During the Roman Empire, any non-noble who dared to try to wear purple could be executed. Queen Elizabeth I forbid anyone but her family from wearing it as part of the Sumptuary Laws that governed what each social class could wear. This reddish-purple was even thought to look similar to dried blood, connecting royals to the idea of a divine bloodline. It became popular among the ruling class in Egypt, Persia, and the Roman Empire and carried through until the mid-1500s.^[9]

The reason why purple dye was so rare is that it was incredibly difficult and expensive to produce. The Phoenician city Tyre was the main producer of the dye, which was called Tyrian purple or royal or Imperial purple To extract the pigment, hundreds of thousands of sea snails had to be collected, cracked, and exposed to sunlight (which produced a truly horrible smell). This process required up to 250,000 snails for one ounce of dye, which made it prohibitively expensive for almost everyone,^[10] and the snails were only native to the Mediterranean. The clothing made from this dye never faded, and it was literally worth its weight in gold.^[11] In 1856, teenage chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally invented a much cheaper purple dye while working on anti-malaria treatment. This new dye, eventually called “mauve”, helped purple become available to everyone.

7 Vermillion

Vermillion is also known by the names cinnabar and China red, but you definitely don’t want to be mixing up any of it at home. Vermillion gets its red-orange hue from mercury, and the smaller the mercury particles are, the brighter red vermillion is. It has been used for close to 8,000 years, since Ancient Romans retrieved it from Spain and used it in cosmetics and art. It was also used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. Prisoners and slaves were given the dangerous job of mining cinnabar in the Spanish mines of Almadén, and it was then heated and crushed to form pigment.^[12] It was also used in Renaissance painting and of course in China where it got its alternate name. There it was mixed with tree sap and used for temples, ink, and pottery.^[13]

The Ancient Chinese created synthetic cinnabar, but it was still toxic. Eventually Cadmium red replaced it as the choice for artists in the 20th century, as it was much less deadly and didn’t fade into a reddish-brown, as vermillion had the tendency to do.^[14] Bright red-orange remains associated with traditional Chinese culture to this day, associated with luck and happiness.

6 Scheele’s green

In the early 1800s, a brand new dye swept the Victorian high society. German color-maker Carl Wilhelm Scheele released a shade of green so vibrant that it became the go-to of ladies attending parties across Western Europe. New gas lamp technology made nighttime events brighter and this emerald green was perfect to make a statement as a modern and fashionable woman. Soon Sheele’s green was seen across Britain in dresses, wallpaper, carpeting, and artificial plants.

Unfortunately, this new dye color was made with copper arsenite, which contained the deadly element arsenic. Women who wore it broke out in blisters. Families started vomiting in their green living rooms. The factory workers who used the dye daily suffered organ failure. One faux flower maker named Matilda Scheurer suffered a gruesome death, throwing up green, the whites of her eyes turning green, and telling others that everything she saw was green.^[15] Although people at the time were aware that arsenic was deadly when ingested, the buzz around Sheele’s green helped to spread the idea that the material could kill through other methods of exposure as well.^[16] Despite doctors and media quickly figuring out the connection, people resisted the warnings in the name of fashion until 1895.^[17]

10 Explanations For The Color Schemes Used On Everyday Things

5 Lead white

As far back as the 4th century B.C., the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were using this thick white pigment for make-up, medicine, and paint. Ancient Greek authors Pliny and Vestruvious even described it in their writings.^[18] The process for making it was fairly simple: soak lead metal in vinegar and then scrape off the white powder that formed. Many manufacturers and artists developed what was called “Painter’s Colic”, which we now recognize as lead poisoning.^[19]

Lead white’s thick consistency and fast drying speed made it a favorite of artists across Europe. But lead can enter the body if it is breathed in, ingested, or absorbed and it can cause long-term damage to the brain and kidney.^[20] Even though it was clear that this paint was deadly, artists couldn’t find a good match for its creamy warm tones, and it was used until it was formally banned in the 1970s.

4 Uranium orange

In 1936, the Fiestaware ceramics company started to come out with a bright new line of dinnerware. A bold orange-red color called “Fiesta Red”, these dishes started appearing in homes across America. The bright color came from uranium oxide, which is radioactive. From 1943 to 1959, the production of these orange dishes paused, as uranium was banned from civilian use to save it for the war effort. When they started production again, a different form of uranium was used, called depleted uranium, which is slightly less radioactive than the natural form.^[21]

Many dishes from the time period used radioactive materials in their production, and the EPA warns that they can now emit alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.^[22] Fiesta red dishes were produced until 1972, when the line was discontinued, but this line is still highly sought after by collectors, although it is recommended that you don’t actually eat off them, especially acidic food.^[23] Fiestaware still makes dinnerware, although the colors will not match the old ones due to the fact that they no longer use uranium or lead in their glazes.

3 Radium green

In 1908, a very unique paint appeared. It was self-luminous and glowed a bright green in the dark, which was perfect for watches and compasses that could now be used at night. Radium appeared all over the market in the late 1800s to early 1900s, used in drinks, candy, creams and lotions, soap, spas, and swimming pools. The glowing, fizzling radium became connected with the idea of a healthy glow.^[24] The watches were first used for the military in World War I, and after the war, they began to spread to consumers.

A group of young women and girls worked in the factories painting watch faces, later known as “the Radium Girls”, and it was considered an artistic job with access to this fun, newly discovered substance. The girls licked their paint brushes to give them a fine point and also sprinkled the dye on their fair and face so they would glow in the dark at parties. In the 1920s, the girls started to show signs of radiation poisoning. They developed sores, rotted jaws and teeth, and several died before the problem started to be understood. In 1928, Grace Fryer led her fellow workers in suing the New Jersey factory, causing a media frenzy. The girls won.^[25] Many of the surviving girls also agreed to be studied in the 1950s, and the U.S. vastly expanded their understanding of the effects of radium on the body. Radium paint for watches officially stopped being used in 1968. Glow-in-the-dark products today are most often made with photoluminesce, where they absorb and then re-emit light, which is not toxic.^[26]

2 Red-green and blue-yellow

These two colors are not forbidden by any ruler or made of some deadly material. The problem with these colors is that they are almost impossible to see. Red and green cancel each other out inside of the human eye and blue and yellow do as well. The retinas of the human eye allow us to take incoming light and make specific neuron fire in the brain to recognize each color. But these pairs of colors inhibit each other in the brain, so they cannot be viewed simultaneously.

Until 1983, when scientists Hewitt Crane and Thomas Piantanida conducted an experiment. Volunteers were shown adjacent stripes of yellow/blue or red/green. Each eye was forced to focus on a single color using an eye tracker. By doing this, their eyes were tricked into slowly blending the colors and creating a new shade.^[27] Participants reportedly had trouble describing this, as no words existed for these colors. When a repeat study was done in 2006 by Dartmouth University and scientist Po-Jang Hsieh, volunteers were given a color mapper to try and match the impossible colors that they saw, and some chose a brownish color referred to as “mud” for the red-green combination.^[28]

1 Gamboge yellow

In the 1600s, the British East India Company brought back a new bright yellow pigment from Asia. Gamboge was named after the country of Cambodia, which used to be called “Camoboja” from the Latin word “gambogium” meaning pigment. It was collected as sap from bamboo shoots of trees at least ten years and then turned into fine powder or hard rocks that could be wet to paint with. This sap was poisonous itself, but that was not the only reason that gamboge became unpopular. The color was used in traditional Chinese painting, but the color faded fast and can be hard to recognize today.^[29]

In the mid-1800s in England, a snake oil salesman named James Morrison came out with “Morrison’s vegetable pills” made of gamboge, which acted as a strong diuretic and laxative. Doctors quickly realized that gamboge irritated the skin and could be deadly as medicine in even small amounts. Also in 1980s, a Winsor & Newton paint company employee found a bullet in a piece of gamboge, and it was quickly discovered that it had been collected from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.^[30] In 2005, Winsor & Newton stopped using Gamboge and replaced it with a non-toxic version called “New Gamboge”.^[31]

10 Moments That Changed Color Forever