Crimson
- HEX
- #DC143C
- RGB
- 220 20 60
- HSL
- 348° 83% 47%
- CMYK
- 0 91 73 14
Crimson or Scarlet?
Deeper than scarlet, leaning toward purple.
Language
Crimson means 'made by a worm'. It came into English around 1400 from Medieval Latin cremesinus, from Arabic qirmizi, and back through Persian to Sanskrit krmija, the dye from tiny insects. Carmine shares the root, and vermilion, from Latin vermiculus, 'little worm', carries the same idea.
History
Kermes insects live on the kermes oak around the Mediterranean. Dried, they look like seeds, so old texts called the dye grain, and colorfast cloth was 'dyed in the grain', which is where ingrained comes from. American cochineal later gave the same red with a tenth as many insects.
Culture
Harvard's sports teams and its student newspaper are both called the Crimson.
Art
Painters used crimson as a glaze. An insect red fixed onto a clear base makes a transparent paint, a lake, and a thin layer over brighter red glows like stained glass. Sassetta laid a kermes crimson over silver leaf to make St Francis's robe glow, and five centuries later Mondrian found the purest red still came from glazing bluish crimson over orange-red vermilion.
Science
Crimson's weakness is light. Insect-red lakes fade: Turner's crimson and carmine sunsets have paled. Rothko's crimson mixes for his Harvard murals included a newer synthetic, Lithol Red, which faded so badly in a sunny room that the paintings came down in 1979.
Kin
- Carmine: Same Arabic root, qirmiz; carmine swapped kermes for cochineal
- Vermilion: Another 'little worm' name, though vermilion is a mineral
- Scarlet: The luxury cloth that kermes dyed red
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Crimson' (etymology; kermes vs carmine)
- Etymonline, 'crimson', 'ingrain'
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Gage, Colour and Culture (1993)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- Greenfield, A Perfect Red (2005)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.