The History of Color

This episode first published in April, 2021

We haven't always seen color the same way.

Pink used to be for men. Blue for women.

People HATED colorful outfits when they first emerged. One aristocrat complained of "loud, swearing colors," because the new bright fabrics distracted him from his reading.

In this episode Carolyn Purnell takes us on a magical journey through the history of color.

Guest Carolyn Purnell, Ph.D.
https://www.carolynpurnell.com/contact

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

I see trees of green red roses too. I see them blue from you. And I think to myself. What a wonderful way.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Louis Armstrong's classic from 1967 has all the colors of the rainbow. Music has the ability to create color for our imaginations. Armstrong actually recorded this song in Las Vegas in the middle of the night and was paid only $250 for his work. He insisted on that because that's all the rest of the orchestra members were being paid, each. Larry Newton, the president of ABC Records in the US, hated the slow melody. Hated it. Refused to promote it. Newton had to be physically locked out of the recording studio that night. The orchestra and Louis recorded the song with Newton fuming and pacing right outside the door. It didn't get much radio play in the U.S. and may never have caught on at home except different TV shows and movies kept using it. The Muppets in 1978, the BBC in the early 80s, and the 1987 movie Good Morning Vietnam. Suddenly, it caught on, and today there are more than two million downloads of Armstrong's classic. Today on Stories and Strategies, a historical look at color. Which has a colorful past. My guest this week is Carolyn Furnell. Hi, Carolyn. Hi, Doug. And you're joining us today from one of my favorite cities, Los Angeles area. How is LA today?

SPEAKER_03 2:46

Positively frigid at 21 degrees Celsius.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Oh my goodness. Well, it can only get warmer. Yeah. That's room temperature for everyone if you're listening and you're used to Fahrenheit. 21 Celsius.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Yeah, 21 Fahrenheit would be quite frigid.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Exactly. That's not volleyball weather. Carolyn, you are a history instructor and writer. You've won awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the European Commission, the Huntington Library, and the Society for French Historical Studies. Your work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Four Seasons magazine, Apartment Therapy and Psychology Today, which is where I found you. You have a Master of Arts and a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. It's great to have you here.

SPEAKER_03 3:31

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

You've done some wonderful research. Let's begin with the history of color. And because I've read all your articles, I'm I'm pretty much just repeating what you've already written here. Um, different colors were rare in some geographies. They were prohibitively expensive in terms of dyes for garments, paintings. I mean, you might see a painting in your parish church. And in addition to that accessibility issue, there were actually laws in many older societies making colors prohibitive.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

Right. I mean, when we look around today, it's possible to see man-made colors everywhere we look traffic signs, book covers, clothes, and every shade of the rainbow. But we really forget that for most of human history, colors didn't come from chemistry or factories. They came from bugs, minerals, and plants. So that means in an era before mass transportation, most people only had access to the bugs, minerals, and plants in their regions. Their color world was really bound by what was available in any particular season, what colors were strong enough to resist fading in sunlight. For example, the green from chlorophyll fades really quickly. They may have seen certain colors like the blue of the sky, but they had no real way to harness that immaterial goods. So, really, for the majority of people, the things they owned were pretty drab by modern standards. Um, rarer pigments traded from other parts of the globe were super expensive. Um, but even if you were wealthy enough and you could afford those pigments, strangely, it didn't mean that you could use them. In Europe, a whole system of laws existed that were called sumptuary laws. And those laws dictated who could wear what colors or who could even purchase what colors. So, for example, only people of a certain rank could purchase ultramarine, which is the mineral that gives, well, ultramarine is the color, but it comes from lapis lazuli, the mineral that gives this brilliant blue. Um, even the painters who were hired, you know, to paint those beautiful portraits of the Virgin Mary, they couldn't buy it. The actual patrons had to go to the apothecary to per make the actual purchase. Um, or in the king in the court of French King Louis XIV, only the highest nobles could wear red heels. So if you broke the law and wore red heels, if you weren't of that certain status, you could even be put to death. So basically, color clearly identified a person's place in a social hierarchy. If you were walking down the street, you could tell at a glance who had money, who had status, and exactly like what amount of money and status they had.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Hmm. So then in the late 18th century, things start to change. There's uh massive technology changes. We we know what that's like, but they're accompanied by cultural and economic revolutions as well as scientific advances. When the apple hits Sir Isaac Newton on the head, he discovers gravity and he develops the concept of the seven-color spectrum, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:37

Right. Which, you know, I think it's it's sort of wild to think that that's only a few hundred years old. We kind of think the rainbow has always been the rainbow. Um, but as you say, the the color world began to be revolutionized in starting in the 17th and 18th centuries with the expansion of things like global trade, um, the expansion of colonialism and slavery. It made colorings like indigo and cochineal red really cheap on the backs of exploited labor. But things really, really got going in the 19th century with the creation and commercialization of cheap chemical colors. These were often made with things like coal tar or arsenic. So they were not always healthful substances. Um, but basically, these were hyper bright, hyper cheap, and easily reproducible pigments. So, in a matter of years, people moved away from that world where every color came from a bug or a plant, um, had this very clear visual social order. They went to one with no visual boundaries whatsoever. So even the poorest people could wear hyper bright colors. There's nothing visually separating a duchess from a seamstress by the time the 19th century rolls around.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

So that's a total shock, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:50

We have like color anarchy, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:53

As you call it.

SPEAKER_03 7:54

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

So, what did we do to try to tame this?

SPEAKER_03 7:57

Well, one of the things that we tried to do uh to tame this, you know, I, you know, just I want to stress this idea of color anarchy for a moment because it it sounds kind of odd. Um, but for people who had not been exposed to these super bright colors, there are actual newspaper accounts, people complaining that they are being hyper-stimulated by these colors and getting headaches from seeing them. There's one of my favorite accounts is a French writer who was visiting England and he complained. This is a quote, that loud, excessively numerous swearing colors is what he called them, um, on women's dresses were ruining his leisurely walks through the park because he could no longer concentrate on all the beautiful scenery. Um, so so this really was like something very jarring for for people. Um and so I think there was an attempt really to kind of control color um in a new way from a lot of different quarters. Um one of the major ways people try to tame this beast, this color anarchy, is by creating new color systems full of rules. So uh if you've ever had an art class, you've heard of primary, secondary, tertiary, warm, cool, complementary, contrasting colors. All of those concepts come from this period. There's an entire genre uh called the color dictionary. And the idea of these books is that if you could define every color that exists in the world, then you would no longer have anarchy. You could figure out a system of rules so that people would use these colors appropriately. Um, and you know, when I say there are all of these new color taxonomies, I'm talking hundreds, if not thousands, of new systems. They're cropping up everywhere in science, art, manufacturing, fashion. There's just this huge fascination and honestly fear about color in this period. Um, you know, and there are also a whole set of rules developing that are more quietly entrenched in culture. Like they're not formalized in rule books, but we still have them today. So for instance, ideas like don't wear blue with black, or don't wear certain colors if you have a certain complexion, or it's acceptable to wear an accent of color, but it would be very crass or gauche or immoral to wear a super bright outfit. Um and, you know, this is one of the things I find very interesting is there is a moral discourse that develops around this.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

And somebody just came up with that and it made its way through the Twitter of the day, whatever that was.

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

Um, you know, fashion magazines, um, media, popular literature. Um, I mean, I think there's also just a general, you know, even philosophers, not that everyone's reading philosophy, but Goethe famously said that bright colors were necessary only for children and savages because they needed more extra, they needed more sensory stimulation to be able to experience pleasure. So you can see a ton of, you know, pretty honestly racist and classes connotations coming into the discourse about color in this moment as well.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

It's so great that even in historical times when there's something brand new that no one knows anything about really, suddenly there's experts who know all about it.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

Um, uh yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

So one of the rules, we we we group things as human beings and we socially group things. One of those groupings is male and female. That's just what's been handed down. Um, so one of the rules we came up with is that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. I mean, it's always been that way, right? From the dawn of time. It's always been that's the case.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

Obviously, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

Um, actually, you know, the pink and blue rule is surprisingly recent. So if you asked someone in 1890 which colors were associated with which gender, they would have given you a really strange look. Um, pink was actually used for both genders because it was considered a youthful color. So it would have been more acceptable for a five-year-old boy to wear it than a 60-year-old woman. Um, that kind of starts to shift a little bit. Uh, in the early 20th century, for example, one 1918 article says that there are generally accepted rules about pink and blue for gender. But the rule is that pink is for boys while blue is for girls. Um and the reason that, you know, potentially was because be pink was seen as a derivative of the masculine color red. So passion, anger, blood, war, those very manly virtues. Yes. And blue was seen as more innocent and calm, indicative of a girl's, you know, kind of uh placid temperament, I guess. Um and so you you have almost the the opposite idea about pink and blue. And to get to where we are today, um, there was a whole system of things that changed, but it really started solidifying in the 1950s.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Well, and by 1957, um, there's that movie Funny Face, distributed by Paramount. It captures this thought process perfectly. Fashion magazine publisher Maggie Prescott, played by Kay Thompson, is looking for the next big fashion trend. She doesn't just want a new look, she wants the look to encourage women to start thinking differently. Think pink.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Banish the black, burn the blue, and burn the bed. From now on, girl. Pink pink, think pink when you shop for summer clothes. Think pink, think pink if you want that kelp shows. Red is dead, blue is true, green's obscene, brown's taboo, and there is not the slightest excuse for pump abuse. Or chartreuse. Pink pink! Forget that Dior says black and rust. Think pink! Who cares if the noodle has no bust? Now I wouldn't presume to tell a woman what a woman ought to think, but tell her if she's gotta think. Think pink.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

In 1949, Brooks Brothers made a line of pale pink women's button-up shirts that hit the pages of Vogue. And the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, ended up loving that color so much, she made it her signature color, which she called First Lady Pink. And immediately after she started swanning around in pink everywhere, the Textile Color Card Association, you can kind of think of them as like a proto-pantone. They were kind of color forecasters, color consultants. They started pushing pink as a woman's color. But, you know, women started wearing a lot of pink. There's this huge vogue for pale pink in the 50s and 60s, but it still was kind of unisex. Men also wore it until the 1980s. And that's when pink really, really locked onto girls.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Pink and gray was the big combination.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

Well, yeah, it was. And you know, I found out why this happened, which fascinated me. I learned this from the historian Joe Paletti, and it isn't maybe not the reason that you would expect. The reason pink was so firmly associated with girls in that moment and blue with boys is the advent of prenatal testing. So once people could tell the sex of their baby before it was born, the need for unisex baby goods waned and people got super excited about buying for their little girl or buying for their little boy. And in 1985, Love started offering pink and blue diapers. And after that, everything pink and blue followed.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

So is is that when did it originate that we realized, hey, color can help us sell stuff? It sounds like 60s, 70s, 80s. Is that roughly the time frame?

SPEAKER_03 15:37

Well, I think that there's probably an escalation in that moment, but but interestingly, uh the real change kind of happened in the 1920s at the end of World War I. Uh, in that moment, the economy was really depressed. And so uh there was a big meeting in Washington, D.C. to solve the problem of underconsumption in the US. And as a there was a meeting held on color and the economy. And color was proclaimed what they called, quote, the symbol of the new standard of life. And manufacturers and marketers turned to color as the massive selling point that could basically redeem the economy. And, you know, there's there's kind of a technological reason for this. Uh the synthetic color industry had been dominated by Germany, but in the 1920s, America became a much bigger player. So all across the country, new initiatives like color forecasting, color management programs, color engineering, um, these really took off. And this kind of 1920s fervor is the moment when companies figured out that, for example, offering different color cars could give Ford an edge over Chevy, or that colorized home goods could boost sales. So that was really the first time that color became a corporate strategy.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

And there was a big dispute over magenta, right? Uh, which I've dubbed the magenta massacre, but that may not be, I'm not sure if that's history.

SPEAKER_03 17:00

I yes, the magenta massacre is actually a little bit earlier. It's um, it's well, not a little, it's in the 1850s. So this is right when um when synthetic colors start being marketed right after chemists latch on to that you can create these hyper bright colors. These brothers in France, named the Fox, the Renard brothers, which means the Fox brothers, they bought the rights to magenta and built a factory. Because you could. Wow. Um and they built a factory in southern France uh to manufacture magenta. And this manufactory was spewing out all kinds of toxic waste, putting it in the water supply, and um, because the color was made with arsenic, and uh and a lot of inhabitants of the village died. Um, there were some lawsuits. The Renard brothers actually came out ahead. Um, they were allowed to continue making magenta, but in kind of an ironic twist of fate, um, they there were so many copycats that violated their claims on the color magenta that they ended up suing everyone who took the color and they ended up bankrupting their own company by basically trying to hold such a tight grip on magenta.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

You have one passage in your third article that I'd I'd just love for you for you to expand on. It quote, we accept many of these color-related ideas now as a kind of second nature. In fact, our most basic knowledge, the things we question the least, is where our deepest social and cultural values often lie. When something seems uh natural to us, it becomes a place that unarticulated assumptions and unthinking behaviors can easily hide. By this do you mean that we are prejudiced, we are biased, we are privileged, and we are blind.

SPEAKER_03 18:50

Well, it's it sounds so much less nice that way, but yeah, when it comes to color, yes. Um, I think that most of us assume that people's relationships to color have always been the same. So when you learn colors in kindergarten or in art classes, there's no mention or or concept that those um colors might have a history. So most of us don't think to ask why white is the most popular paint color for homes or why it's acceptable for a man to wear a pink tie but not a pink suit to a job interview. And we'd also don't tend to consider the fact that color psychology actually changes. So, for example, we think of green as a natural calming color today, but 19th century artists and psychologists described it as the color of anxiety and fatigue. So, you know, by questioning these kinds of things and really looking deeper into these kinds of changes and assumptions, I think we can not only enrich our understanding of our world and our past and ourselves, which, you know, all of that's super important, but I also think we can draw closer to the answers on some really relevant economic and social questions. Um, like what motivates, excites, and drives consumers? What can previous shifts in color tell us about how people's needs might change in the future? What hidden values are we signaling when we use certain colors? And maybe, you know, just looking to the future, how can we once again revolutionize the way people see color and maybe get them more excited about it again to create that excitement and novelty in in a fresh way?

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Last question, an obvious one. What's your favorite color?

SPEAKER_03 20:32

It's obvious, but not that easy. I would say kind of a a mint green that verges on an aqua blue. I don't have a good name for it.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Um is that like a minty taste or an ice cream? What what does it conjure up for?

SPEAKER_03 20:45

Oh, for me, you know, honestly, I have uh I have a lamp in this color, and I used to have a room painted in that color, and it just always made me happy. So I don't think there's a material referent for it, actually. That, you know, it's not like I can point to the sky or the tree, or it's just an odd, does seem like a toothpaste kind of a color, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Oh, but but vision is the strongest of our senses, right? And color has meaning.

SPEAKER_03 21:10

Oh, sure. It does. It really does. Seeing is believing.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Thank you for this today. Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Thank you so much, Doug.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Carolyn Purnell, best way to do that is through her website. I do have a link to that in the show notes, but it's CarolynPurnell.com backslash contact. We've also put links to the show notes to each of Carolyn's three articles from psychology today. If you liked what you heard today, we're hoping you choose to subscribe to Stories and Strategies and receive updated episodes automatically. We'd love it if you followed us on Twitter. It's at comms underscore podcast. We're also hoping you choose to follow and rate this podcast on any directory. You can tell all your friends, but we're asking you to at least please tell one friend. If you have an idea for an episode, you just want But tell us something, something colorful. Send us a note at info at JGR Communications dot com. Thanks for listening.