Blue consistently comes first for both men and women in every country where colour preference has been surveyed.
Even today several languages have green-blue blurring, including Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Kurdish, Zulu and Himba.
One reason is that it seems to have a calming effect. Students given IQ tests with blue covers had an edge of a few points over those given tests with red covers, perhaps because of the natural connotations of blue – seas, lakes, rivers, skies.
The oldest yellow pigment is yellow ochre, which was amongst the first pigments used by humans. Egyptians and the ancient world made wide use of the mineral orpiment for a more brilliant yellow than yellow ochre. In the Middle Ages, Europeans manufactured lead tin yellow. They later imported Indian yellow and rediscovered the method for the production of Naples yellow, which was used by the Egyptians. Modern chemistry led to the creation of many other yellows, including chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow, and cobalt yellow.
Of course the usual associations of green relate to the natural world but it has also picked up some more malign connotations, including envy, jealousy, inexperience, illness and poison.
This last meaning came from the pea-green pigment called Scheele’s green, used in dyes and paints for carpets, fabrics, wallpaper, ballroom gowns and confectionary. Problem was that this dye, invented in 1775, contained high doses of arsenic.
It was particularly lethal in wallpaper, releasing tiny particles of arsenic into the air. When Napoleon died in St Helena in 1821 British were suspected of poisoning him. Later, however, it was discovered that the green wallpaper in his room contained arsenic. This may have hastened his death, but the real cause was cancer.
The English word orange is a corruption of the Sanskrit. People mistook ‘a naranga’ for ‘an aranga’, and later into ‘an orange’.
In 1856, William Henry Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry student, was told to conduct an experiment using coal tar to find a cure for malaria. He failed but was intrigued with what happened when he dipped a piece of cloth into his mixture of coal analine and chromic acid: it came out purple and held its color. He patented the dye he called mauveine and became a rich man after it was mass-produced..
Until then purple had been prohibitively expensive (the ancients needed to crush 12,000 murex sea snails to get one gram of Tyrian purple) but the result of Perkin’s discovery was the ‘Mauve Measles’ as Punch magazine called the fashion craze.
Purple has long been associated with royalty, originally because Phoenician purple dye was extremely expensive in antiquity.
