Today, however, Baker-Miller pink is pretty rare, even in prisons. It seems that as crime rates in the United States—the country where the overwhelming majority of the testing had been done—began to fall, priorities shifted. It is also a rather sickly color, so it may be that the guards, nurses, and wardens had no more desire to be surrounded by it than those under their care. For the moment, the world’s interest in Baker-Miller pink lies dormant and hundreds of questions remain unanswered—until the next crime wave perhaps.
Mountbatten pink
For the first six decades of the twentieth century, at precisely 4 p.m. each Thursday, the horn of a large cruise liner would sound across Southampton Water and a Union-Castle ship would slip from its berth and steal south, bound for Cape Town. Even if the timing hadn’t been as regimented, it would still have been difficult to mistake these ships for any other: they had scarlet funnels trimmed at the top with a stripe of black; their upper decks were gleaming white while their hulls were an indeterminate dull lavender-gray-pink shade. It was a feature their poster advertisements made much of: those proud pinkish hulls slicing through blue waves, with sunlit landscapes visible in the background.
It was probably not such jaunty images, though, that preoccupied the mind of Lord Mountbatten, the British statesman, while he was aboard his ship, the HMS Kelly, in 1940.1 In the first year of the Second World War the Royal Navy had suffered tremendous losses: the Luftwaffe sighted convoys from above while packs of German U-boats closed in from below. The sheer loss of life was terrible enough, but during the war Britain was utterly dependent on the supplies being brought in from abroad. It was all too clear that something needed to be done. Captains began testing different kinds of camouflage in the hope of evading their hunters. Some elaborated on the strident dazzle designs that had been used during the Great War, the aim of which was not to hide the ships but, like the bold stripes on a zebra, to confuse attackers, making it difficult for enemies to estimate the dazzle-painted ships’ bearing, speed, and distance. Others tried two-tone grays—dark on the hull, pale on the superstructures—so that the ships’ coloring echoed the difference between sea and sky.2
Perhaps it was these efforts that were in Mountbatten’s mind when he noticed that a requisitioned Union-Castle liner, still bearing its civilian livery, disappeared into the gloaming well before the other ships in the convoy. He became convinced that the Union-Castle’s distinctive hull color might be the very thing that the navy had been looking for. While it stood out during the day, at dawn and dusk—two of the most treacherous times for attacks on ships—the dull, pucey color seemed to disappear. Before long all the destroyers in his flotilla were painted medium gray with a dash of Venetian red, a tone that quickly became known as Mountbatten pink.
Other captains followed Mountbatten’s lead, and the color might have spread across the entire navy had it not been for the official camouflage section of the Admiralty, which began putting different paints and patterns through their paces. Ships were soon being painted official camouflage colors: a subdued gray-and-blue version of the dazzle design.
It is not known whether the Admiralty included Mountbatten pink in its tests; nor has it been recorded how sailors felt about the ever-shifting colors of their ships. We do know, though, that just at the time Mountbatten pink was being phased out in 1942, many had become convinced of its effectiveness. One story in particular is still remembered in favor of Mountbatten pink’s miraculous powers of concealment. In the final months of 1941 HMS Kenya—nicknamed “the Pink Lady” after her paint job—came under heavy fire just off Vaagso Island near the Norwegian coast. Although strafed by two large guns for minutes on end, she escaped with only cosmetic damage and no casualties. Proof, or so it seemed to some, that this particular shade of pink was the very thing the navy had been searching for.
Puce
Prerevolutionary France was awash with evocative color nomenclature. Apple green and white stripes, for example, were called “the lively shepherdess.” Other favored individual shades included “indiscreet complaints,” “great reputation,” “stifled sigh,” and “the vapors.”1 Then, as now, indulging in the latest fashions signaled status, wealth, and a sense of tribal belonging in the jeweled echo chamber of the French royal court. It was in this stultifying environment that puce became the color of a season.
In the summer of 1775, 20-year-old Marie Antoinette had been the queen of France for one year, and her reign was not going well. In the spring, a wave of riots over the price of grain—known as the Flour Wars—had convulsed the country, and the foreign-born queen was rapidly becoming an object of loathing. Rumormongers told tales of her wild gambling, her faux-milkmaid exploits at the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles, and her closets stuffed with expensive clothes and hats. To her starving subjects, such profligacy was galling. Alarmed at the reports from France, her mother, the redoubtable Empress Maria Theresa, wrote to scold her daughter for her “extravagances of fashion,” telling her that she was “hurtling toward an abyss.” “[A] queen,” she wrote, “only degrades herself . . . through unthrifty expenditure, especially in such a difficult time.”2 But the young queen would not listen.
Her husband, King Louis XVI, sensing his wife’s sartorial indulgences were dangerously unseemly, was less than thrilled when he found her trying on a new lutestring (glossy silk taffeta) gown in a peculiar shade somewhere between brown, pink, and gray. Had he been feeling more chivalrous he might have called it “faded rose” but instead he observed that it resembled the couleur de puce—the color of fleas.3 If it had been the king’s intention to shame his wife, though, his words backfired. “The next day,” recalled Baronne d’Oberkirch, “every lady at court wore a puce-colored gown, old puce, young puce, ventre de puce [flea’s belly], dos de puce [flea’s back].”4 Writing to her daughter from the French court that summer, Lady Spencer described puce as “the uniform at Fontainebleau and the only color that can be worn.”5
A few days after the fall of the monarchy 17 years later on August 10, 1792, the Bourbon royal family found themselves in drastically different circumstances. Their new, post-Revolution apartments consisted of a cramped and dirty cell-like suite in the Little Tower at the Temple. Here the royal couple were kept under guard until their executions the following year. Naturally, Marie Antoinette was not allowed many clothes, and those she did have had to suit her new life. They needed to survive the squalor of her new rooms and repeated washings, and to signify her status as a prisoner and “assassin of the people.” Her trousseau consisted of several simple white shifts, an embroidered muslin skirt, two capelets, and three dresses: a printed brown toile de Jouy; a simple chemise with an equestrian-style collar, in a color known as “Paris mud”; and a taffeta gown the color of fleas.6
Fuchsia
Fuchsia is one of the many colors that owe their name to a flower,1 and although the fuchsia’s distinctive, double-skirted flowers actually come in a variety of ballerina hues—including whites, reds, pinks, and purples—it is an achingly bright blue-based pink that adopted the name. Today that might not be considered much of an honor; fuchsia was voted one of the three least popular colors in Britain in 1998, and the word has been the bane of spelling-bee entrants for years.2 However, the story behind the flower’s name is, at its heart, about love: the love of botany.
Hippocrates, born sometime around 460 B.C. on the island of Kos, is perhaps the earliest known person to have shown a considered interest in plant life. His study was related to the practice of medicine: many plants were used to treat ailments, or to cause them, and a good doctor needed to know which was which. Later came another Greek, Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 B.C.), who published the first treatise on the subject; then Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79), who mentioned over 800 species of flora in his Natural History; and Avicenna, the Persian philosopher, scientist, and prodigious author—some 240 of his titles still survive—who was born around A.D. 980.3 Over 500 years later, however, whe
n Leonhard Fuchs, who was studying to become a physician in Bavaria, began his own researches into plants, the field had barely advanced at all.
To rectify the situation, Fuchs began creating a garden that he filled with every kind of plant he could lay his hands on. (All the likenesses of him from that time show a man with a plant grasped in one hand and a singularly focused expression.) He applied to friends all over Europe and those setting off to explore the New World, beseeching them to send him samples or descriptions of plants that they came across. The fruit of all his hard work, the finely illustrated De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Notable Commentaries of the History of Plants), was finally published in 1542.
“We have devoted the greatest diligence,” Fuchs proudly wrote, “so that every plant should be depicted with its own roots, stalks, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruits.”4 Three artists worked on the book’s 512 images. Altogether it described some 400 wild and 100 cultivated plants, including descriptions of species from the New World that few Europeans had ever seen before, such as the chili pepper—the name he gave it meant “big pod” in Latin. He also gave evocative names to plants that people must have seen hundreds of times, like the beautiful Digitalis purpurea (which means purple fingers) to the common foxglove.5
Strangely, though, Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant that now bears his name. Though now common across much of the world, the first specimen known to Europeans wasn’t found until 1703—some 137 years after Fuchs’s death—growing wild on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The man who found it, Père Charles Plumier, was a botanist and, wanting to honor his hero, named it in Fuchs’s honor.
Shocking pink
Known to Winston and Clementine Churchill as “the Imbroglio,” Daisy Fellowes was a very shocking woman indeed.1 Born in Paris in the dog days of the nineteenth century, she was the only daughter of a French aristocrat and Isabelle-Blanche Singer, the sewing machine heiress. In the 1920s and ’30s she was a notorious, transatlantic bad girl: dosing her ballet teacher with cocaine, editing the French Harper’s Bazaar, carrying on a succession of high-profile affairs, and throwing parties to which she only invited pairs of mortal enemies. She was, according to an artist acquaintance, “the beautiful Madame de Pompadour of the period, dangerous as an albatross”; to Mitchell Owens, a writer for the New York Times, she was “a Molotov cocktail in a Mainbocher suit.”2
One of her numerous vices was shopping, and it was one of her purchases from Cartier that unleashed this scandalous shade of pink onto the world. The bright pink Tête de Bélier (“Ram’s Head”), a 17.47-carat diamond, had once belonged to Russian royalty.3 Fellowes wore it one day when meeting one of her favorite designers, the inventive, surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (Fellowes was one of the only two women brave enough to wear the infamous high-heel hat designed in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli herself was the other.) It was love at first sight. “The color flashed in front of my eyes,” Schiaparelli later wrote. “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life giving, like all the lights and the birds and the fish in the world together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West—a shocking color, pure and undiluted.”4 She immediately incorporated it into the packaging for her first perfume, released in 1937.5 The bottle, designed by the surrealist painter Leonor Fini, was modeled after the voluptuous torso of the actress Mae West, and came in a distinctive hot-pink case. Its name, of course, was “Shocking.” The color became something of a touchstone for the designer, cropping up again and again in her collections and even in her own interior decoration: her granddaughter, the model and actress Marisa Berenson, remembers Schiaparelli’s bed being covered with heart-shaped, shocking pink pillows.6
Age has not dimmed the color’s appeal. In the brash 1980s Christian Lacroix often paired it with bright red; most, however, use it only sparingly. A notable exception can be found in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In 1953 the costume designer William Travilla was urgently called to the set. The filmmakers were panicking about its star, Marilyn Monroe, as a nude calendar featuring the actress had just been released and the press was in a slavering uproar. The studio decided her assets needed to be more jealously guarded. “I made a very covered dress,” Travilla later wrote, “a very famous pink dress with a big bow in the back.”7 It is this outfit Monroe wears when singing the tune that helped seal her place in Hollywood’s firmament, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” No doubt Daisy Fellowes, by then a determinedly soignée 63-year-old, wholeheartedly agreed.
Fluorescent pink
On April 21, 1978, the British punk band X-Ray Spex released 15,000 limited-edition copies of their new single, “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” on pumpkin-orange 7-inch vinyl. On the cover a globe, roughly colored in a mixture of yellow, red, and poison-bright pink, stands against a lime background. The song’s lyrics—almost incomprehensible in lead singer Poly Styrene’s screeching yowl—bemoan the world’s seeping artificiality.
Fluorescent colors were a hot new thing in the 1970s, amped-up versions of the bright colors beloved by advertisers and pop artists in the 1960s. In 1972 Crayola introduced a special-edition box of eight fluorescent crayons, including the ultra pink and hot magenta colors, all of which glowed brightly under a black light. The strident brashness of super-bright colors perfectly suited the aesthetic of the emerging punk movement too. Highly saturated fluorescent-style pinks were used to paint Mohawks and the lettering of many classic punk albums of the era, like the pink-and-yellow design on the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album designed by Jamie Reid in 1977.
Most of the colors we think of as fluorescent are actually just very high-intensity hues. True fluorescents are so bright not only because the colors are very saturated but also because the chemical structure of the dye or material absorbs the very shortwave light in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum, which humans can’t see, and re-emits it as longer wavelengths, which we can.1 This is what gives them that particular glowing brightness in daylight, and is also why they shine under black lights.
A favorite use of this technology worldwide is in the humble highlighter pen. Created in the 1960s, highlighters were originally just felt tips with thin, water-based inks that allowed the original text to show through. A decade later fluorescent dyes were added to highlighters to make the portions of text they were brushed over seem even more attention-grabbing. Stabilo has sold over 2 billion highlighters to date, and although they are available in an ever proliferating array of colors, two stand head and shoulders above the rest: 85 percent of sales go to yellow and pink.2
Amaranth
“A rose and an amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden,” begins Aesop’s fable. The amaranth, a leggy plant with fresh green leaves and dense, catkin-like blooms, speaks to her neighbor. “How I envy your beauty and your sweet scent! No wonder you are such a universal favorite.” But the rose replies, a little sadly: “I bloom but for a time: my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade . . . they are everlasting.”1
Aesop’s audience would have known exactly what he meant. Although many of the 50 or so species that make up the genus have some rather unpleasant monikers—“careless weed,” “prostrate pigweed,” “love-lies-bleeding”—amaranth has long been revered. Its name is homonymic, referring to the plant and also meaning “everlasting.” Garlands of amaranth were used to honor heroes like Achilles because they hinted, with their long-lasting blooms, at immortality.2 This symbolism made it irresistible for writers: in Paradise Lost John Milton gave the angelic host crowns woven from amaranth and gold [here].
The people with the richest relationship with amaranth, however, were the Aztecs, who called it huautli. The earliest archaeological evidence for amaranth comes from what is now Mexico and dates from 4000 B.C. The plant was an important foodstuff: the leaves can be cooked like spinach and the pinhead-sized seeds can be toasted or milled or popped like corn.3 Some amaranth was grown on spe
cial floating gardens, boats filled with soil and set adrift on lakes; the water helped regulate the temperature of the soil and stopped animals from getting at the crop.4 Farmers delivered some 22,000 tons of seed to Montezuma (1466–1520), the last Aztec ruler, each year.5
The Spanish conquerors were highly suspicious of amaranth. The problem was not the role it played in the Aztecs’ diet, but in their religion. They considered the plant sacred and it played a key role in many rituals. The Catholic Spaniards were particularly disturbed by the practice of mixing a little blood from human sacrifices into amaranth dough and baking it into cakes, which were then broken up and eaten by the faithful. It was all a little too close to a parody of Holy Communion for them to stomach.6 Growing, eating, and even possessing amaranth were outlawed.
What saved the amaranth was its toughness and fecundity. A single seed head can contain 500,000 seeds, and it will grow anywhere. Try as they might, the Spaniards could neither stamp the amaranth out completely, nor erase its association with the divine. In 1629 a priest complained that the locals were supplementing their Christian devotions with little edible figures of Christ baked from amaranth dough. In the nineteenth century there were reports of rosaries being made out of the stuff, and popped amaranth, mixed with honey, is still used to make a sweet called alegria (“happiness”) in Mexico.7
The Secret Lives of Color Page 9
