The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  King Henry VIII, however, rarely noted for his sweetness of temper, was definitely redheaded. In 1515, when the king was 24 years old, the Venetian ambassador wrote, “His majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion.”2 (Even this, though, is confusing: “auburn” started out referring to a pale yellow or brown, a kind of off-white, but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its meaning shifted to a deeper ruddy brown.) Henry’s daughter by Anne Boleyn—whose hair color was possibly also reddish (descriptions vary)—was Queen Elizabeth I, the redheaded ruler par excellence. The precise shade of her hair, though, is elusive: strawberry blonde in one portrait, red-gold in another, coppery auburn in a third.

  Away from the British throne, redheads, particularly women, punch well above their weight in terms of cultural visibility. Many fictional female characters, including Annie, Jessica Rabbit, and Wilma Flintstone, are imagined with red hair. Then there are redheads in art. While Titian favored rosy caramel tresses, and Modigliani preferred auburns, 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.” She was also Rossetti’s lover and, later, wife. When she died of a laudanum overdose, Rossetti buried a book of his poetry with her, but years later he disinterred her to retrieve it. A witness said that Siddal’s flaming hair had continued to grow, so that it filled the coffin when they prized it open. Rossetti never quite recovered.

  Although the origin and whereabouts of the ur-redhead are still a mystery, some tantalizing evidence of its history came to light in 1994. Two jawbones were unearthed in the El Sidrón cave in northern Spain. At first, because the bones were in such good condition, it was assumed they were relatively recent, perhaps dating back to the Spanish Civil War. As more bones began to surface, showing marks where knives had sliced muscle from bone, the scene began to take on the grim character of a cannibalistic massacre. Police and forensic scientists were called in. They discovered that a crime had indeed taken place, but that they were about 50,000 years too late to catch the culprits.3

  The cave contained the remains of a family of Neanderthals: three men, three women, three teenage boys, two children, and a baby. Enough evidence remained to show that two of the individuals had bright red hair.4 They were the victims, rather than the aggressors.

  Minium

  In the opening pages of the Gladzor Gospels the text is pressed beneath a heavily gilded pediment decorated with a portrait of a tonsured saint. Surrounding him is an explosion of colorful, curlicued foliage filled with fantastical creatures. A pair of blue cranelike creatures with red and green wings face each other, beaks open in silent screeches. Over the page are a startled peacock and four birds that resemble lilac partridges, each with a heart-shaped red leaf clasped in its beak. Some pages are so choked with gilded greenery and bizarre, peeping figures that it seems as if the words were an afterthought.

  Prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type sometime around 1440, books were restricted to noblemen, clergy, and a few others, such as clerks, who needed to be literate in order to do their jobs. They were also expensive. Manuscripts were created by hand—in Latin manu means hand while scriptus means written—and were usually commissioned by a powerful patron to reflect his or her piety and status. Each book represented hundreds of hours of labor and was wholly unique, from the animal skins that made up the leaves of parchment, to the pigments used for the illuminations, to the fists of the scribes.

  The Gladzor Gospels were created during the fourteenth century, in a small region in central Armenia, halfway between the Black and Caspian Seas. Then, as now, Armenia was caught both politically and culturally between the East and the West, the Muslim world and the Christian one. Under the aptly named Gregory the Illuminator, it had been the first country in the world to convert to Christianity, in A.D. 301.1 Perhaps it was pride in this fact, coupled with anxiety over the Mongol occupation, that led those who worked on the Gladzor Gospels to pour so much frenzied creativity into the manuscript and its illustrations. As in most monastic endeavors, the production of this manuscript required a precise division of labor. First, scribes would have copied the text, carefully leaving space for the paintings, and then a team of artists would have begun their work.2 If the team that worked on the volume was large enough, it would have been the sole responsibility of one person to add the capitals, headings, and pilcrows (¶) in a particular shade of orange-red so bright that they leapt off the page.

  The pigment used was minium. The person who worked with it was called a miniator, and his work, an eye-catching symbol or heading in a manuscript, was called a miniatura. (This is the origin of the word “miniature,” which in its original sense did not mean small at all.)3 Minium was used extensively in manuscript illumination during the Middle Ages, and use of it only gradually died out as vermilion [here] became more readily available from the eleventh century.4

  Although minium, or lead tetroxide, can be found in naturally occurring deposits, this is rare, and it has more commonly been manufactured. The process is essentially a continuation of the one used to make lead white [here] and was described, in a pleasingly magical way, in the eleventh-century Mappae clavicula:

  [T]ake a pot that has never been used, and put sheets of lead in it. Fill the pot with very strong vinegar, cover and seal it. Put the pot in a warm place and leave it for a month. Next . . . shake out the deposits around the sheets of lead into a ceramic pot, and then place [it] on the fire. Stir the pigment constantly, and when you see it turn white as snow use as much of it as you like; this pigment is called basic lead white, or ceruse. Then take whatever is left on the fire, and stir it constantly until it becomes red.5

  Minium was often used as a cheap alternative to vermilion and cinnabar; in fact, the three pigments were often confused, even though minium is generally much yellower than either (Pliny the Elder described it as “flame colored”).6 Perhaps the confusion was in part due to wishful thinking: although it is cheap, bright, and easy to make, minium is far from an ideal pigment. Even though, like its near relation lead white, it was used as a cosmetic in ancient Greece and China, it is just as poisonous.7 Another major problem is that it does not mix well with others, including the near-ubiquitous lead white, and has, George Field reported in 1835, a tendency to turn black in impure air.8 Luckily for historians, the Armenian air proved equal to the challenge. While the stone walls of the Gladzor monastery have long since disappeared, the minium in this particular manuscript is as illuminating as ever.

  Nude

  The wardrobe choices of women in politics often cause a stir, but in May 2010 the column inches surrounding one particular outfit spooled out further than usual. At a state dinner given at the White House in honor of the president of India, the first lady (and the first African American first lady), Michelle Obama, chose a warm-cream-and-silver gown designed by Naeem Khan. This was a subtle act of sartorial diplomacy: Mr. Khan was born in Mumbai.1 The problem arose, however, when the story was reported. Associated Press called the dress “flesh-colored”; others used Khan’s own description: “sterling-silver sequin, abstract floral, nude strapless gown.” The response was immediate. As Dodai Stewart, a journalist for Jezebel, put it: “Nude? For whom?”2

  The terms for this particular pale shade—“nude” and “flesh,” and even the less common “suntan” and “bare”—presuppose a Caucasian skin tone and are therefore problematic. Despite being painfully out of step with a global fashion market, they are curiously obdurate. Nude heels are wardrobe staples; nude lipsticks are daubed on millions of pouts every day. In reference to clothing the terms persist despite the existence of a plethora of
alternatives: sand, champagne, biscuit, peach, and beige [here]. The color first became popular for women’s underthings—corsets, girdles, pantyhose, and bralettes—in the 1920s and ’30s. Soon the association between naked flesh and these silky undergarments invested the color with an erotic charge. Designers have drawn on it again and again, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the “underwear-as-outerwear” trend.3

  The idea behind such “nude” undergarments was presumably that they would be less visible through diaphanous fabrics. Of course, just like their modern equivalents, they only really matched the skin color of a very select few, even among Caucasian women. One person who understands this better than most is the Brazilian photographer Angélica Dass. Since 2012 Angélica has been working on a “chromatic inventory” of human skin tone. The ongoing “Humanæ” project is now composed of over 2,500 portraits of different people from around the world. The subject of each portrait—seemingly naked although only the head and shoulders are visible—is shot with the same clean, bright light. What makes the portraits special is the backgrounds. Each is dyed to match the subject’s complexion (a sample is taken from the face), and the matching alphanumeric Pantone code is printed at the bottom. Angélica is a Pantone 7522 C.4 The portraits’ power lies in being viewed as a group, and looking at them makes clear immediately how feeble and inadequate the labels “white” and “black” really are. The variety in skin tone is both staggering and oddly moving.

  It could be argued that “nude” as a color term is sufficiently divorced from any actual skin color to be harmless. The problem, though, is not with the color, or even the word itself, but with the ethnocentrism behind it. “Those of us with skin darker than ‘nude,’” wrote Ms. Stewart in 2010, “have realized how non-inclusive the color is—from Band-Aids to pantyhose to bras—for years.” There have been advances of course: fewer makeup companies pretend that one shade of sandy pale foundation will “suit all skin tones,” and in 2013 Christian Louboutin launched a range of pumps in five different skin colors, from pale to dark.5 We all know that “nude” is a spectrum and not a shade; it is high time the world around us reflected that too.

  Baker-Miller pink

  Mountbatten pink

  Puce

  Fuchsia

  Shocking pink

  Fluorescent pink

  Amaranth

  Pink

  Pink is for girls and blue is for boys; the evidence is everywhere. In the “Pink & Blue Project,” which began in 2005, the Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon captures images of children surrounded by their possessions. All the little girls sit marooned in identical pink seas.

  Amazingly enough, the strict girl-pink boy-blue divide only dates from the mid-twentieth century. Just a few scant generations ago the situation was completely different. In an article on baby clothes in the New York Times in 1893 the rule stated was that you should “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl.” Neither the author nor the woman in the shop whom she was interviewing were quite sure why, but the author hazarded a tongue-in-cheek guess. “[T]he boy’s outlook is so much more roseate than the girl’s,” she wrote, “that it is enough to make a girl baby blue to think of living a woman’s life in the world.”1 In 1918 a trade publication affirmed that this was the “generally accepted rule” because pink was the “more decided and stronger color,” while blue was “more delicate and dainty.”2 This is probably closer to the real explanation. Pink is, after all, just faded red, which in the era of scarlet-jacketed soldiers and red-robed cardinals was the most masculine color, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. At the turn of the century even the idea of different clothes for children of different sexes was a little odd. The mortality and birth rates were so high that all children under the age of two wore easy-to-bleach white linen dresses.

  The word pink itself is relatively young too. The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary of the word being used to describe pale reds is the late seventeenth century. Before then pink usually referred to a kind of pigment. Pink pigments were made by binding an organic colorant, such as buckthorn berries or an extract of the broom shrub, to an inorganic substance like chalk, which gave it body. They came in several colors—you could have green pinks, rose pinks, or brown pinks—but were, more often than not, yellow.3 It is an odd quirk that while light reds acquired a name of their own, pale greens and yellows did not for the most part (although several languages, including Russian, do have different words for pale and deep blues). Most romance languages made do with a variation of the word rose, from the flower. Although it is not certain, it is likely that the English derived their word for the color from another flower, the Dianthus plumarius, also known as the pink.

  Pink, however, is far more than the color of flowers and princess dresses. Dressed (or not) in salmon-colored silks, the women depicted by the eighteenth-century rococo artists, such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, while hardly feminist pinups, were certainly shown as being in full control of their allure. Their figurehead was Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France and a consummate consumer who helped popularize bright pink Sèvres porcelain. Daring, full-blooded pinks were a hit with strong, characterful women. It was a favorite of magazine editor Diana Vreeland, who liked to call it “the navy blue of India.”4 Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian fashion designer; Daisy Fellowes, an heiress and magazine editor; and Marilyn Monroe, who needs no introduction, all made shocking pink [here] the color of choice for twentieth-century women who wanted to be both seen and heard.

  Pink’s current image problem is partly due to the feminist backlash against old-fashioned sexism. It is seen as simultaneously infantilizing and, ever since artists first put mixtures of cochineal, ocher, and white to canvas to depict naked female flesh, sexualizing. Nudes are still, overwhelmingly, female. In 1989, while 85 percent of the Metropolitan Museum’s nudes were women, only 5 percent of the artists represented were. In a recent article, the Guerrilla Girls, a group pressuring the art world for greater diversity, said that since then the figures have become worse still.5 The case against pink as the color of female objectification was only helped in the 1970s by a surprising discovery made about a particular shade [here].

  Recently it was revealed that products for women, from clothes to bike helmets to incontinence pads, routinely cost more than products for men and boys that are practically identical. In November 2014 French secretary of state for women’s rights Pascale Boistard demanded to know “Le rose est-il une couleur de luxe?” (“Is pink a luxury color?”) when it was discovered Monoprix was selling a pack of five disposable pink razors at $1.93. A ten-pack of blue disposable razors, meanwhile, cost $1.85.6 The phenomenon has come to be known as the “pink tax.” Color preferences may have reversed over the past century, but it seems in many ways the boy’s outlook remains more roseate.

  Baker-Miller pink

  In the late 1970s American cities were scourged by wave after wave of drug epidemics and spiking violent crime rates. So when in late 1979 a professor announced that he had found a way of making people less aggressive, the nation pricked up its ears. The secret, Alexander G. Schauss announced in the pages of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, was a sickly shade of bright pink.

  Over the course of the past year Schauss had conducted numerous tests. First, he had measured the physical strength of 153 young men, half of whom had stared at a deep-blue piece of cardboard for one minute, the other half at a pink piece of cardboard.1 All but two of the men shown pink were weaker than average. Intrigued, he used a more accurate measure of strength, a dynamometer, to test 38 men: pink did for every one of them what a haircut had done for Samson. Away from the lab the hue seemed just as effective. On March 1, 1979, two commanding officers at the U.S. Naval Correctional Center in Seattle, Washington, Gene Baker and Ron Miller, turned one of their holding cells pink to see if it would have an effect on their prisoners. They carefully added one p
int of semigloss red trim paint to a gallon of pure white latex paint to obtain the perfect Pepto-Bismol shade, and set to work coating the walls, ceiling, and ironwork of the cell.2 Before this, violence had been a “whale of a problem,” said Baker, but over the next 156 days there wasn’t a single incident.3 Similar results were reported at the Kuiper Youth Center in San Bernardino; in fact, reported Dr. Paul Boccumini, happily, “it has worked so well that the staff must limit their [delinquents’] exposure because the youngsters become too weak.”4

  Schauss began making public appearances to demonstrate how the newly christened Baker-Miller pink (named after the two officers in Seattle) could sap the strength of even the toughest man. During one memorable television appearance he tried it out on the reigning Mr. California; the poor man could barely complete a single bicep curl. It soon became something of a pop-culture phenomenon in America. It crept over the seats of bus companies, the walls of housing estates, small-town drunk tanks (hence its other nickname, “drunk-tank pink”); and, finally, the visitors’ locker rooms at college football stadiums.5 (This last use led to a ruling that football teams could paint visitors’ locker rooms any color they chose, just as long as the home team’s locker room was painted to match.)

  There was, naturally, an academic backlash. Over the next decade scientists probed the efficacy of Baker-Miller pink on everything from anxiety levels to appetite to coding ability. Results were contradictory. A 1988 study could not find a link between the shade and blood pressure or strength, but did see significant effects on the speed and accuracy of participants in a standard digit-symbol test.6 A 1991 study found that there were reductions in the systolic and diastolic blood pressures of emotionally disturbed participants who were put in a room painted pink. Another study, carried out on prisoners and male university students pretending to be prisoners, found that both Baker-Miller-painted walls and pink-filtered light could reduce the time it took for those exposed to become calm.7