Malachite
- HEX
- #0BDA51
- RGB
- 11 218 81
- HSL
- 140° 90% 45%
- CMYK
- 95 0 63 15
Malachite or Emerald?
Lighter and more intense than emerald.
Language
Malachite means mallow stone. The Greeks named it after the green leaves of the mallow plant, the same plant whose flower gave French its word mauve.
History
Egyptians mined malachite in the Sinai from about 4000 BCE, ground it for green eye paint and pigment, and pictured part of the afterlife as a Field of Malachite. It stayed a painter's green until about 1800. See malachite-pigment.
Design
Russia's tsars clad whole rooms in malachite from the Urals; the Malachite Room of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg is the famous one.
Science
Malachite is touchy as paint. Cennino Cennini warned that grinding it too fine turns it dingy, so painters left it coarse. Its blue twin, azurite, is almost the same copper mineral, and over centuries azurite can slowly turn into malachite: some medieval Italian blues have gone green.
Kin
- Mauve: Both named after the mallow: one its leaf, one its flower
- Turquoise: Another copper stone the Egyptians mined in the Sinai
- Green: One of the oldest green pigments
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Malachite' (molochites; Egypt c. 4000 BC; pigment until c. 1800)
- State Hermitage Museum, 'The Malachite Room'
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Wikipedia, 'Azurite' (alteration to malachite)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.