Purple
- HEX
- #7B3FA0
- RGB
- 123 63 160
- HSL
- 277° 43% 44%
- CMYK
- 23 61 0 37
History
Purple was the color of snail slime and emperors. Tyrian purple came from murex sea snails. In 1909 the chemist Paul Friedländer crushed 12,000 of them to get 1.4 grams of pure dye. Diocletian's price edict of 301 CE capped a pound of purple silk at 150,000 denarii, the same price it set for a lion. See royal-purple.
Language
Purple is named after a shellfish. Latin purpura and Greek porphyra meant both the murex snail and its dye. Byzantine children born to a reigning emperor were called porphyrogennetos, born in the purple, after the palace chamber where empresses gave birth.
Science
Purple is a color your brain makes up. No single wavelength looks purple; you see it when red and blue light arrive together. Violet, at the short end of the spectrum, is a real rainbow color, so purple and violet are not quite the same thing. A purple object has to soak up the middle of the spectrum, the greens, and send back both ends. See extra-spectral.
Symbolism
Purple is the Church's color of waiting and penance, worn in Advent and Lent (liturgical-colors). In 1856, 18-year-old William Perkin, trying to make quinine, made mauveine instead: the first aniline dye, a fashion sensation, and the end of purple as a privilege.
Culture
Ancient purple was not our purple. Pliny says the most prized Tyrian shade was the color of clotted blood, nearly black until light struck it, and the Roman jurist Ulpian counted as purpura any red not dyed with insects. Purple covered crimsons and violets alike; only much later did the word settle between red and blue.
Kin
- Indigo: Tyrian purple is indigo's molecule with two bromine atoms added
- Byzantium: Named for the empire that made purple its imperial monopoly
- Mauve: Perkin's coal-tar dye made purple cheap in 1856
- Violet: The rainbow's real end; purple has no wavelength of its own
- Yellow: Imperial purple in Rome, imperial yellow in Qing China
Sources
- Friedländer (1909), via Wikipedia, 'Tyrian purple' (6,6'-dibromoindigo)
- Edict on Maximum Prices (301 CE), trans. Kropff, University of Bergen
- Garfield, Mauve (2000); Royal Society of Chemistry, 'William Perkin'
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Gage, Colour and Culture (1993)
- Greenfield, A Perfect Red (2005)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (2002)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.