❤️ Red pigment was once as expensive as gold leaf. Shades of red (crimson, carmine, red lead, cadmium red, etc.) were derived from insects, mercury sulfide, and tree sap.
💗 Pink wasn’t culturally assigned as a gendered color until 1950s, and not used as a gender identifier for baby girls until the 1980s.
🧡 Orange pigment was popularized by impressionists like Van Gogh & Toulouse-LauTrec who looked East at (buddhism, confucianism, etc) for their saffron colored robes to symbolize perfection.
💛 Since the Egyptians, yellow has been used to characterize imperishable, eternal, & indestructible. While they ascribed yellow to be feminine, Chinese culture assigns yellow the active and creative masculine, the Yang principle.
💚 Green symbolizes renewal but green pigments were difficult to come by for most of human history. The ones that did exist were highly toxic, through the 1960s.
💙 French Artist Yves Klein owns the trademark of a tone of ultramarine blue called International Klein Blue (IKB) and went on to paint 200+ monochrome canvases, sculptures and people in his color from 1947-57.
💜 For the whole of human history, the color purple has been associated with royalty. Basic supply and demand at play, rare purple dyes made purple clothing so expensive, only royalty and nobility could afford it.
🖤 The little black dress, made popular by Coco Chanel in 1927, became a wardrobe staple that’s responsible for our reassignment of meaning: from mourning, serious, and evil to chic, luxurious, and refined.
🤎 Brown is one of the most common colors on Earth, making it psychologically soothing for our eyes and communicating a rooted, familial feeling.
🤍 White is used to symbolize purity, innocence & divinity. The universal color for both men & women’s underwear & of sheets since the 18th and 19th centuries, it soon became culturally unthinkable to have sheets, socks, or underwear of any other color. Washing in boiling water causes colors to fade & white feels cleanest after many washes.
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