Beige
- HEX
- #E6D5B0
- RGB
- 230 213 176
- HSL
- 41° 52% 80%
- CMYK
- 0 7 23 10
Beige or Cream?
Darker and sandier than cream.
Language
Beige is French for natural wool, neither bleached nor dyed, as ecru is for linen. The word spread in France around 1855 to 1860 and is recorded as a color in English from the late 1880s.
Design
From the 1970s to the 1990s, beige was the color of computers: keyboards, monitors and towers, a look Apple and IBM popularized and German office rules helped lock in.
Science
Early in 2002, astronomers at Johns Hopkins averaged the light of about 200,000 galaxies and announced that the universe was pale turquoise. A software error had skewed the result. Weeks later they corrected it: the average color of the universe is a light beige, nicknamed cosmic latte.
History
For most of history beige was what you got, not what you chose. Until about the 1700s, European dyers and bleachers could not make cloth truly white, so 'white' wool and linen were really beige, ecru or greyish. In Renaissance Europe such undyed shades marked the poor and humble monks; bright, lasting color took imported dyes only the rich could afford.
Kin
- Ecru: Both mean undyed: beige wool, ecru linen
- Taupe: Another French word English borrowed for a neutral
In paintings
- The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai
- The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer
- Rouen Cathedral (series), Claude Monet
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Beige' (first English use 1887; computers)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Nelson, Bluets (2009)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- Pastoureau, White: The History of a Color (2023)
- Greenfield, A Perfect Red (2005)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.