Storied Colors — the canonical browseable destination for named colors with documented histories.
The saturated orange-red of Homer Laughlin's Fiestaware dinner plate, glazed with uranium oxide at up to fourteen percent by weight, produced from 1936 until the Manhattan Project commandeered the supply and revived briefly with depleted uranium until around 1973.
The deep cobalt-blue stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, surrounded by a 'lost recipe' legend that the documentary record contradicts.
Stuart Semple's daylight-fluorescent pink, sold under a click-through that buyers must not be, or be acting on behalf of, Anish Kapoor.
A fermented unripe-persimmon tannin dye used in Japan since the Heian period for paper, cloth, and fishing nets. Unusual among natural colourants for deepening with light rather than fading.
A cooler, non-toxic alternative to lead white commercialised by Winsor & Newton as 'Chinese white' for the Victorian watercolour boom.
The yellow earth used at Lascaux and Chauvet, still mined commercially at Roussillon in the south of France.
Europe's homegrown blue, the dye of Pictish warriors and medieval Toulouse merchants until cheaper Indian indigo destroyed the trade.
The premier yellow dye of medieval Europe, mixed with woad to produce the Lincoln green Robin Hood is traditionally said to have worn.
The pale blue of Josiah Wedgwood's 1775 jasperware, calibrated to make neoclassical white reliefs look like miniature Greek temples.
An ink made from boiled walnut husks, used by Renaissance draughtsmen for sepia-toned underdrawings and still beloved of artisanal stationers.
A non-toxic chromium-oxide green, first made around 1838 and given a cheaper industrial process by Guignet in 1859, that finally let Impressionists paint foliage without poisoning themselves.
A cool blue-black made by charring grapevines in sealed pots, recommended by Pliny and still produced today for traditional oil painting.
A triarylmethane dye named for the queen during her diamond-jubilee decade, used for ink, paper and the silk linings of imperial gifts.
A French commercial name for the mixed-pigment greens made from chrome yellow and Prussian blue, attested in French sources from at least the late 18th century and widely used in 19th-century decorative and industrial trades.
A bright earth green named after the painter Paolo Veronese, whose vast Venetian canvases were lit by exactly this cool, dry hue.
Mercury-sulphide red prized from Pompeii to Ming China, whose miners often died young from the cinnabar dust.
The blue-green crust scraped from copper plates left over vinegar, used by medieval manuscript painters despite its tendency to eat through the page.
An iron-oxide red mined near Venice and beloved of the Venetian school for its warmth and total resistance to fading.
The finer grade of parchment made from the skin of unborn calves, the standard support of medieval manuscripts and still used for British acts of Parliament.
The deep purple of Catholic mourning vestments and cardinal under-robes, originally Tyrian and later imitated with cochineal and indigo.
A forest of carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99.965% of visible light, controversially licensed exclusively to artist Anish Kapoor.
A dark brown earth pigment of lignite and humus, named for Anthony van Dyck though he probably never used it.
The pale yellow-green of Vaseline glass: uranium oxide melted into silica, fluorescing vivid neon-green under ultraviolet, produced from 1830s Bohemia until wartime requisition of uranium stocks halted civilian production in 1942-43.
The dark indigo wool issued to Federal soldiers in the American Civil War, standardised in 1861 and worn well into the Indian Wars.
Ground lapis lazuli traded across deserts from Afghan mines, once costlier than gold and reserved for the Virgin's robe.
A paler, pinker product of the same murex glands that made Tyrian purple, achieved by stopping the dyeing process before full oxidation.
The named gemstone whose Persian-via-French etymology means 'Turkish stone', mined for the Pharaohs in Sinai and the Apache in New Mexico.
The South Asian rhizome that dyes monks' robes and curry alike, brilliant in the moment and notorious for fading rapidly in sunlight.
A colourfast madder red whose multi-day, dung-and-rancid-oil recipe was guarded for centuries by Anatolian dyers and stolen by French industrial spies.
A short-lived blue from the spiderwort flower, used by ukiyo-e printmakers for under-drawings that vanished entirely once the print was washed.
The non-toxic 20th-century replacement for lead white, so opaque it accounts for most white paint, paper coatings and even sunscreen on Earth.
Charles Tiffany's signature box colour, chosen in 1845 to evoke the era's prized turquoise jewellery and now a registered trademark.
American shortening of phthalocyanine green, the workhorse green of mid-century house paints, plastics and printers' inks.
A muted green earth used as the underpainting for flesh tones in Italian Renaissance panel painting, lending many old saints their olive cast.
The biblical blue dye of Israelite priestly garments, lost for over a thousand years and recently re-identified with a Mediterranean sea snail.
An acid yellow azo dye patented in 1884 and now in nearly every commercial yellow icing, banned in Norway and Austria for decades.
The catch-all term for the brown polyphenols leached from oak galls and bark, the colour of every traditional leather workshop.
BASF's 1897 industrial synthesis of indigo, the dye that put Bengal plantations out of business and turned every pair of jeans the same shade of blue.
The orange-yellow azo dye of bottled energy drinks and supermarket cake, listed in the EU under the warning label for child hyperactivity.
The deep pine-soot ink of East Asian calligraphy, ground from solid sticks against a stone with a few drops of water before each session.
A yellow lake from buckthorn berries used in medieval illumination, prone to vanishing entirely from old manuscripts within a few centuries.
A bismuth-compound white used as a face cosmetic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, less toxic than the lead-white alternatives it partially displaced.
An aniline pink-red marketed just months after magenta, named after another French battlefield in the same 1859 Italian campaign.
Named in colour terms after the Brothers Grimm's 1812 fairy-tale character, a slightly off-white that became a CSS colour keyword through the X11 colour name system.
The greyed green-grey of wood smoke, codified as a fashionable cloth colour in 17th-century European tailors' lists.
A cobalt-blue glass ground to powder, Northern Europe's affordable answer to ultramarine that tends to fade from blue to grey on aged panels.
Elsa Schiaparelli's signature electric pink, named after the Cartier diamond it was matched to and forever associated with Surrealist fashion.
A silver-copper alloy patinated to a mossy grey, used by Japanese sword-fitting makers for the soft tones around a tsuba's edge.
Powdered gold mixed with gum and stored in a sea shell for use as a paintable gold ink in late-medieval manuscript illumination.
A black-purple patinated alloy of copper and a few percent gold, used by medieval Japanese smiths for sword guards and tea-ceremony fittings.