The dazzling world of colour
There is not just one shade of black and the origins of certain colour shade names are more exciting than some novels. Dive into the fascinating world of colours and their origins with us. Prepare to be dazzled.
Marrs Green
The most beautiful colour in the world
In 2017, British paper manufacturer GF Smith, together with the Hull local authority and design agency Made Thought, launched a survey to reveal the world’s favourite colour.
It was already common knowledge that certain colour shades trigger positive or negative associations. That’s why blue, for example, came out on top globally, while colours like brown found themselves at the bottom of the rankings.
To get a definitive answer and go into a bit more depth, over 30,000 people from 100 countries were asked for their opinion on the most beautiful colour and were able to choose from an extensive catalogue.
Marrs Green emerged victorious from this experiment, which prompted GF Smith to include it in their fixed range of colours.
Fun fact: The colour was named after its founder, the designer Annie Marrs.
Pantone 448C
The world’s ugliest colour?
The story of this colour begins in Australia, when the government tasked research institute GFK with finding the ugliest and most repulsive colour in the world. The institute asked around 1,000 people for their associations with certain colour shades, both positive and negative.
The survey revealed that Pantone 448C, also known as “opaque couché”, evoked nearly exclusively negative associations, such as dirt, tar, or death. Initially, the Australian health minister referred to the colour shade as “olive green”, but the Australian Olive Association stepped in to avoid associations with the colour.
Based on the result of this survey, the government passed a law in 2012 to standardise cigarette packaging in the colour Pantone 448C to reduce the population’s cigarette consumption.
After this was introduced, consumption per capita actually dropped by 5 %. In 2016, countries such as Canada, France, the UK, Ireland, Israel, Norway, New Zealand, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, Thailand, Singapore, Türkiye, Belgium, and the Netherlands followed Australia’s example.
Fun fact: Aside from being used as a deterrent, the Pantone shade is used in many other areas, such as fashion, art, furniture, and cosmetics – you can even find it in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Vantablack
The blackest black
The blackest black was developed by Surrey NanoSystems. It’s not so much a paint or pigment, but rather a substance made from carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.96 % of incident light, making every contour of the object in question disappear so that it looks two-dimensional. The name Vanta stands for vertically aligned nanotube array.
Originally, the material was developed for space travel, testing facilities, and military applications to reduce scattered light in telescopes, for example. However, it actually became most popular through art as artist Anish Kapoor secured exclusive rights to the colour, which caused outrage in the art world and led to a conflict with fellow artist Stuart Semple. He believed that colour should be made accessible to everyone and therefore developed his own shade of black, similar to Vantablack, which anyone was able to buy – except Anish Kapoor.
However, this colour wasn’t just used in the art world – BMW, for example, presented a car at IAA 2019 that was completely clad in the material.
Fun fact: Vantablack only held the record for the “darkest manmade substance” until 2015, when it was knocked off the top spot by the material Dark Chameleon Dimers, which absorbs 99.995 % of light.
Flamingo pink
You are what you eat
Flamingos are known for their striking pink to red colouring, making them one of the most distinctive birds. This unusual colour is primarily a result of their diet, particularly carotenoids, which are abundant in the flamingos’ main sources of food.
Flamingos eat algae, small crustaceans such as brine shrimps and plankton, which are rich in carotenoids. Carotenoids are pigments that appear in many plants and organisms and are responsible for yellow, orange, and red colouring. When flamingos eat these foods, the carotenoids break down in their digestive system and are transported to their feathers, skin, and beak. The pigments are stored here, which is what gives the flamingo its characteristic colouring.
The intense colouring is not just for aesthetic purposes – it also plays a role in the flamingos’ social behaviour. Bright, strong colours indicate health and vitality, which is important when it comes to choosing a partner. Males and females with more intense colouring tend to have more mating success as they are seen as being healthier and stronger.
Fun fact: Flamingo chicks are grey or white when they are born and only develop their pink colouring gradually when they start to eat the same diet as the adult birds. Without a sufficient supply of carotenoids, flamingos would lose their vibrant colour and look rather pale or white.
British racing green
The story of British racing green begins with car enthusiast and newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. He held the Gordon Bennett Cup between 1900 and 1905, where nations such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland were able to race a route of up to 650 km with up to three cars each. The winner from the previous year then had to host the cup in their own country. At the start, nearly all of the cars were grey, which made it hard to differentiate between them.
Gradually, national colours were introduced, for example with Mercedes starting in white, then moving to silver and the Americans going from red to blue/white.
When the British won in 1902, it was up to them to hold the 1903 cup in their country. However, there was a problem: at the time, the speed limit across the whole of Great Britain was 12 mph (20 km/h) and car racing was practically illegal.
To get around this, the venue was changed to Ireland and the team painted their cars dark green as a thank you to the “green isle”.
However, it’s impossible to say exactly what British racing green looks like. Lots of British racings teams, such as Jaguar, Bentley, and Lotus have used different emerald and green shades, whether in Formula 1 or the 24-hour race at Le Mans, and the term is still not protected to this day.
Fun fact: The Gordon Bennett Cup laid the foundation for Grand Prix races, now known as Formula 1, and also for the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) being established.
Duct tape
Just pipe down for once
Duct tape, also known as gaffer tape, dates back to the 1940s. It was developed during the Second World War by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Permacel to solve an urgent problem for the military: they needed a waterproof, strong, versatile adhesive tape to seal and protect the ammunition boxes.
The solution came from an employee named Vesta Stoudt, who worked packaging ammunition boxes at a factory in Illinois. She noted that the closures being used were impractical and suggested a simple, new closure system based on a special adhesive tape. Stoudt wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and described her concept. Her idea struck a chord and was passed on to the War Production Board, which tasked Johnson & Johnson with developing it.
The result was a triple-layer adhesive tape made from a durable woven backing, a polyethylene coating, and a strong adhesive. This combination made the tape durable, waterproof, and flexible. The name “duct tape” did not come about until after the war when the tape was used increasingly to join ventilation pipes (ducts). Its colouring also stems back to this use as the colour of the tape was modified to match the colour of the ducts.
After the war, duct tape quickly cemented its place in the civilian world. Its versatility and reliability made it popular for numerous applications, from household repairs, right through to emergency solutions in the trade sector and on construction sites.
Fun fact: The tape was initially referred to as “duck tape” as it was water-repellent like a duck’s feathers. A piece of tape also formed part of an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, named Comedian. This was sold at Art Basel in 2019 for USD 120,000 and comprised a banana, stuck to the wall with a strip of tape.
Luminova
A shining example
Luminova is a strontium aluminate-based afterglow pigment developed by the Japanese company Nemoto & Co Ltd. in 1998. The substance stores natural and artificial light and emits this over a longer period of time. The glow is the result of inorganic phosphorescence. The electrons are set to a higher energy level when the light enters and a glow arises when these are reset.
The material can be recharged infinitely and is mainly used to produce glowing hands and markings on watches. However, glowing watch features are not a new phenomenon – they were developed before the First World War using radioactive isotopes radium and tritium for the illuminating effect. Even so, unlike Luminova, these had a half-life. This meant that after 12.3 years, half of the material had degraded.
Radium and tritium are not dangerous when enclosed in the watch housing and were used for a long time. However, in 1998, they were largely replaced by Luminova and later by Superluminova as these are not radioactive, withstand nearly any environmental influence, and can be recharged infinitely.
In addition to watches, Luminova is also used in other items, such as glow-in-the-dark paints or signs, for example to indicate emergency exits in the dark.
Fun fact: Fluorescence and luminescence are also present in the animal world. For example, the shell of a scorpion contains the substance beta-carboline, a fluorescent molecule that gives off a gentle glow when exposed to UV radiation (e.g. moonlight).
Peach Fuzz
Color of the Year 2024
The Pantone Color of the Year 2024 is Peach Fuzz, a soft and warm peach tone designed to convey a sense of calm, well-being, and security.This choice of colour reflects design and societal trends, which are moving towards a need for harmony, slowing down, and well-being.The colour describes human interactions, such as embracing a loved one or having a good time with friends. In a time where people are judged by their external achievements, Peach Fuzz is designed to symbolise a shift in priorities towards internal well-being.
The colour is used in many areas, such as fashion, product design, interior architecture, and branding. The colour represents the feeling attributed to it, either when used alone or with other shades, and is a symbol of peace, warmth, and serenity in a fast-moving world.
Fun fact: In 2012, the Color of the Year – Tangerine Tango – was used for a make-up line in collaboration with Sephora.
Cosmic latte
Written in the stars
What colour is the universe? Black, of course! That would be the obvious answer but it’s not actually the case. When we look up at the night sky and only see black, we are ignoring what we can’t see: the entire light spectrum of the stars. And if you were to mix – to put it simply – the light from the largest possible number of stars, you would get a rather unremarkable light beige.
This finding is a byproduct of a scientific study with the aim of determining when as many of our stars as possible were formed. Younger stars emit a rather blue ton in their emission spectrum, whereas older stars have a higher proportion of red. The scientists were therefore able to determine that approximately 6 billion years ago, there was a real star boom.
Fun fact: We have researcher Karl Glazebrook to thank for all this. He found the beige shade so boring that he launched a competition to find a name for it. As he was a passionate coffee drinker and the light beige colour was similar to milk foam, the suggestion “cosmic latte” eventually came out on top.
Rosso Corsa
The Italian red
The characteristic red colour of Ferrari cars stems from the Gordon Bennett Cup (1900–1905). The brand Ferrari didn’t exist yet at this time but the racing cars were assigned national colours. To start with, red was awarded to the Americans but this changed in 1920 when the American racing cars switched to a blue-white colour scheme and the red was left to the Italians.
When he founded the brand, Enzo Ferrari originally had the shade Giallo Modena in mind as this colour is very prominent in the coat of arms of his hometown of Modena. However, he quickly noticed that customer who bought his road cars preferred the red of his racing cars. The colour red, particularly Rosso Corsa, won through. At the start of the 1990s, 85 % of all Ferrari models sold were red. Football legend Diego Maradona wanted his Ferrari F40 in black but Enzo Ferrari himself refused.
Today, Ferrari offers a variety of red shades, such as Rosso Scuderia, Rosso Mugello, and Rosso Fiorano. Meanwhile, the colour Giallo Modena is hugely popular with collectors of the brand. However, one thing is for sure – there’s no other car manufacturer so intrinsically linked with one colour than Ferrari.
“Ask a child to draw a car, and certainly he will draw it red.” Enzo Ferrari
Tiger orange
We see things differently
Despite their striking orange colouring, tigers are surprisingly well camouflaged in the wild. This phenomenon is based on the differing eyesight of a tiger’s prey and the principles of colour perception in dichromats and trichromats.
Most of the tiger’s prey, such as deer and boars, are dichromats. This means that they only have two types of colour receptors in their eyes, unlike trichromats like humans, who have three. Dichromats are generally less sensitive to red and green tones, which means that colours in the red spectrum, like the orange of a tiger, appear less intense to them. For these animals, the tiger’s orange colouring looks like a rather muted green or brown, which blends in well with the surroundings of grass, leaves, and shadow.
Trichromats, like humans, can clearly differentiate between three colours – red, green, and blue. For us, a tiger’s fur therefore looks like a vibrant orange with black stripes. In addition to its colourful camouflage, the tiger’s stripes help it to blur its contours. In the tiger’s natural habitat, made up of dense undergrowth, high grass, and ever-changing light, the stripes break up its body profile and make it more difficult to detect. The combination of the different way its prey perceives colours and the effective camouflage pattern make the tiger one of the best hunters on the planet, despite its coat looking orange to us.
