Every colour,
one solid.
The Institute of Colour Science keeps the reference model: four thousand samples of everything your screen can say, suspended in a cylinder of hue, chroma and lightness.
Drag the solid · scroll to dissect it
Hue
The angle. Walk the rim of the cylinder and you pass every family: red into orange into the long green noon, home through violet.
H 0°Colours with
criminal records.
Most colours live and die as coordinates. A few earned names, patents, lawsuits, and graves. Six from the Institute's vault:
International Klein Blue
PATENTED 1960 · PARISYves Klein bound ultramarine in a resin that refuses to dull it, then patented the recipe. The only colour with an artist's signature.
Mauveine
SYNTHESISED 1856 · LONDONWilliam Perkin, 18, failed to make quinine and accidentally invented the first synthetic dye. Fashion forgave the failure instantly.
Mummy Brown
DISCONTINUED 1964 · RAN OUTGround from actual Egyptian mummies until the supply — mercifully — was exhausted. Pre-Raphaelites buried their last tube in the garden.
Vantablack
LICENSED 2016 · EXCLUSIVELYA forest of carbon nanotubes that eats light whole. Licensed to a single sculptor, to the loud fury of every other one.
Paris Green
BANNED · ARSENICThe most beautiful pigment of the 19th century, and its most patient murderer. Wallpaper, dresses, and then the obituaries.
Safety Orange
STANDARDISED 1955 · ANSIChosen by committee to disagree with every landscape on Earth. The only colour whose job is to be seen and never loved.