Blue
- HEX
- #2563C9
- RGB
- 37 99 201
- HSL
- 217° 69% 47%
- CMYK
- 82 51 0 21
Language
Homer never calls the sea blue. He calls it wine-dark. In 1858 William Gladstone noticed that blue is missing from Homer altogether, and some readers decided the Greeks couldn't see it. They could. They lacked a basic word for it, as many languages once did. Russian today splits light blue (goluboy) from dark blue (siniy), and in a 2007 study its speakers told those blues apart a little faster, though a 2020 repeat did not find the edge. See linguistic-relativity.
History
Blue was the first color people learned to manufacture. Egyptian blue, a fired copper silicate, dates to about 3250 BCE, the oldest known synthetic pigment. Then came ultramarine, ground from Afghan lapis lazuli and priced like gold, and in about 1706 Prussian blue, a lucky accident in a Berlin color-maker's shop.
Symbolism
Blue was a minor color in early medieval Europe. In the 12th century painters began dressing the Virgin Mary in a blue mantle, and the color climbed: into stained glass, onto royal coats of arms, all the way to Europe's favorite color. The historian Michel Pastoureau traced that rise. See heraldry.
Art
Vermeer painted the turban of Girl with a Pearl Earring in costly natural ultramarine, and even mixed it into the shadows of her yellow jacket. Hokusai's Great Wave curls in Prussian blue, newly imported to Japan. And Yves Klein made one ultramarine so much his own that it carries his name.
Science
The sky is blue because air scatters short blue waves far more than long red ones. Blue is rare in living things: the blue morpho butterfly and the blue jay have no blue pigment at all. Their blue comes from microscopic structures that sort light.
Kin
- Yellow: Goethe's polar pair: blue nearest darkness, yellow nearest light
- Orange: Complementary opposites; Monet set them side by side at Le Havre
- Azure: Named for lapis lazuli, the stone behind ultramarine
- Indigo: The plant dye behind the world's blue cloth, from uniforms to jeans
- Pink: The two swapped places as boys' and girls' colors in the 1900s
Sources
- Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858); Winawer et al., PNAS 104 (2007)
- Harvard Gazette, 'When Egyptians made blue' (2026); Wikipedia, 'Egyptian blue' (Hierakonpolis bowl, c. 3250 BCE)
- Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (2001)
- Kremer Pigmente / UPenn Architectural Conservation Lab, 'Prussian blue'
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.