Status Updates From The Secret Lives of Colour

Writing to her daughter from the French court that summer, Lady Spencer described puce as “the uniform at Fontainebleau and
the only color that can be worn.”

P.116
For the moment, the world’s interest in Baker-Miller pink lies dormant and hundreds of questions remain unanswered—until the next
crime wave perhaps.

Rossetti and his
fellow Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were not fussy, just so long as their
models’ hair was red. Elizabeth Siddal, a copper-headed poet, was the muse
for several of the Pre-Raphaelites: she is Sir John Everett Millais’s
“Ophelia,” and Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix.”

For those prepared to bear with
saffron’s peccadilloes, however, the rewards are great. It has been used as
an aphrodisiac and a cure for everything from toothache to plague.
wisp of a taste that at one moment might be reminiscent of hay, and the next
something rather more bosky, like mushroom.

linked with
Protestantism and protest, particularly in Ireland, where Protestants are known as Orangemen
Kandinsky described orange “red brought nearer to humanity by
yellow.” does seem to be forever in danger of sliding into
another color category: red and yellow on either side, brown below. Kandinsky, perhaps a better summation“Orange is like a man, desperately seeking to convince others of his powers.”

In Chromophobia David Batchelor describes going to the house of a rich art collector that had been decorated entirely in the shade:
There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind
of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior
to it, and that is almost everything . . . This white was aggressively white.3

Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together. During the Middle Ages mixing colors at all was a taboo, believed to be against the natural order; even during Newton’s lifetime, the idea that a mixture of colors could create white light was anathema. P.21