Magenta
- HEX
- #FF00FF
- RGB
- 255 0 255
- HSL
- 300° 100% 50%
- CMYK
- 0 100 0 0
Magenta or Hot pink?
Purple-pink at full strength, more violet than hot pink.
History
Magenta is named after a battle. Around 1859 a vivid aniline dye called fuchsine, after the fuchsia flower, appeared in France. It is usually credited to the chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin. On 4 June 1859 France and Sardinia beat Austria near the Italian town of Magenta, and By 1860 British makers were selling it as magenta, after the victory. It followed mauveine in the first wave of synthetic dyes.
Science
Magenta isn't in the rainbow. No single wavelength looks magenta; your brain builds it when red and blue light arrive without green. On the light wheel it sits opposite green. See extra-spectral.
Design
Magenta is one of the printing inks in CMYK, with cyan and yellow. Deutsche Telekom trademarked its magenta and has gone after companies in unrelated fields, such as the insurer Lemonade. See color-trademarks.
Language
Magenta had a twin. The same dye was also sold as solferino, after a second bloody battle that June, and both names became fashion news. Magenta itself has drifted: it began as a purplish crimson and now reads as a bright pink. Its screen twin, fuchsia, honors the botanist Leonhart Fuchs, who died long before Europeans ever saw the plant.
Culture
Early magenta was made with arsenic acid. An 1870 German test of commercial samples found arsenic in most, some over 6 percent. In Basel, waste from a fuchsine works poisoned a pond, the groundwater and five wells, and in 1873 the city banned arsenic-based fuchsine. Cautious food makers and pharmacists kept using insect carmine until arsenic-free reds arrived.
Kin
- Mauve: The first aniline dye; magenta followed within three years
- Aqua: Cyan and magenta, the colored printing inks with yellow
- Green: Its opposite: magenta is light with the green taken out
- Purple: Both are colors the brain assembles, with no wavelength of their own
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Magenta' (Verguin; Nicholson and Maule, 1860; Battle of Magenta, 4 June 1859)
- Wikipedia, 'Fuchsine'
- Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (2000)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Greenfield, A Perfect Red (2005)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- Swiss National Museum blog, 'A poison to dye for' (2026) (Basel fuchsine works)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.