Arranging paint and (once again) vermillion

If you have ever picked up a card of paint samples and said to yourself "Gee whiz! I love the feel of the way these colors go together. The aesthetic beauty is overwhelming!" then you should probably contact Phil Kenyon to thank him for providing you with a few moments of sensual pleasure in your otherwise drab, wretched existence. If, on the other hand, you have picked up a paint card and said to yourself "OMG! Were these paint chips arranged by a left-footed Batswanian bandersnatch with halitosis?" then you might want to call up the paint company and tell them about Phil Kenyon.

Which color set has that "I gotta buy some paint right now" look?

It is very unlikely that the paint cards were actually arranged by Phil. Phil is not in the hallowed profession of paint sample card designers. But he is the president of Chromalyzer, a company which provides software to help paint sample card designers lay out their paint sample cards in a way that feels good. I bet you didn't even stop to think that such software might exist. I didn't give it any thought until I met this gentleman who trods amongst the artists and the scientists.

Phil has access to a huge database of names and spectra of all the colors of paints offered by all the paint companies in the universe. Naturally, in my unrelenting quest to find out what color vermilion is, I contacted him. His answer is worthy of being my first guest blog.

What's in a name?

by Phil Kenyon

While it is likely that furthering a discussion on finding ways to convert grass cuttings or the gas from old sneakers into a new energy source would result in a more tangible benefit to mankind, sadly I know nothing whatever about this topic other than I may well be a great source for at least one of these basic ingredients. This being the case I am limited to selecting John’s Discussion on The Definition of Vermilion to expand on, rather than attempting any loftier goal.

I have spent a great deal of time striving to better understand and navigate the largely subjective languages and landscapes in the world of color and attempt to bring objectivity and order to the process for those that seek to use the power that color wields over our lives and emotions for the purposes of good rather than evil.  

John’s Question “What is the definition of Vermilion” could possibly be answered with another question, “What is in a name”.  Since the original question was asked by a mathematician, the answer to my second question can be stated in precise mathematical terms as “a lot”.

Occurrences (Gamut in L*a*b*) of the use of Vermilion or Vermillion (sp) in color names taken from a compiled list of over 35,000 color names in use in decorative paint palettes in North America

The fascinating thing about color is that it generates a great deal of passion not only from the Physiological influence that it has over us from a visual perspective, but that it also creates a great deal of passionate discussion over how we define it in terms of an adjective, or in terms of a colorimetric value. 

Since color is derived essentially from Light we can define the visible spectrum in terms of wavelengths measured in Nanometers (400 to 700nm give or take….).  No argument there right? The problems start when you introduce the stuff that absorbs or reflects these wavelengths and therefore what it is that we perceive as a single color. Shine a different kind of light on a painted piece of paper and it looks different. Keep the light the same and make the sample shiny or rough, and it looks different.  Did it change color or just appearance?

This is one problem with trying to define Vermilion. Vermilion, as are most objects that are perceived as being colorful, is something of a chameleon. We have to understand the nature of the chameleon.

Back to the question “What is in a name?” There is a commercial answer and one which actually does also have a loftier goal if it can be answered correctly.

The commercial answer is, people don’t want a color that is described as a nanometer, or an RGB or LAB or any other notation that seeks to define a color in numerical form that allows us to manufacture and reproduce it with some degree of accuracy and control.  They want to connect on a more personal level. Try answering “how do I look” to your husband or wife as 5’7”, 140 lbs, see where that gets you.  

If the description does not meet some realistic expectation, irrespective of whether you actually quite like what you see, the disconnect is likely to result in a negative reaction, No Sale.  It is important to understand what the accepted boundaries are of Vermilion, Terracotta, Ivory, Bronze.  The more broad the terms the more difficult this becomes, consider Cactus, Denim, Candy, Stone.  It is important to use Objectivity in establishing these boundaries of subjective opinion.  Finding the center or in some cases centers of the color space and making sure the color you use is nearer the center and not outside the lines makes sound commercial sense.

As for the Lofty goal, Color has power. It affects mood and behavior and while there may be no unequivocal evidence to support this, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the right color environment will aid in more rapid recovery from illness, stimulate creativity, calm aggression etc.

  

The purists in the Color Science community will be quick to point out that it impossible to define precisely which colors result in these behavior’s since color and appearance are actually not one and the same, which is accurate.  The appearance of a color varies as we described before and is also influenced by many other factors not described here.  However, irrespective of the challenges of being able to specifically define “Vermilion” or “Calming Blue” the ability to define the Zip code that either of these definitions of a color lives in, and the most central address to go look for it is way better than saying it was last seen West of the Rockies.

When you need help choosing a color or defining an entire palette for any purpose, you probably select someone you feel has a good sense of what the color should be.  Just like a great musician, some people just have a natural gift for working with color and a sense of what goes together.  But just like any natural talent, it takes more than that to become the best at what you do. You have to understand the process, learn the nuances of the different genres and most of all understand your audience.  I may never be the most naturally gifted musician, my role in color is to help everyone in the band be as good as they can be and make sure the audience hears some great music. And if it’s Reggae, it won’t sound like hip hop.

Phil Kenyon is president of Chromalyzer llc, a company that creates and sells software for benchmarking analysis and development of large color palettes and provides consultancy services for clients in the USA and Europe.

Just in case you wanted a bit more of a sense of his software, here are a few movies showing two of other words that are in the vocabulary of color naming people.

Bronze

Cactus

The joy of vermilion, take 2

My recent post on the ambiguity of the word "vermilion" sparked some interesting discussions with a few of my friends. In this blog post and the next, I will share their expert perspectives. Today, I bring the expert perspective of a portrait artist, Jean Kelly.

Some of my favorite paintings by Jean Kelly

As you will remember, based on my analysis, I concluded that vermilion fits in the category of color names that people can't quite agree on. Jean argued with me that vermilion really should be pretty well defined. It is the color of a specific pigment used in paint, cinnabar. Since it is a specific thing, clearly it has a uniquely defined color, right?

On to the meaning of cinnabar!
One little fact that should be added is that vermilion is, according to some definitions, the color of cinnabar. Cinnabar is mercury sulfide, a naturally occurring ore. It has been known since ancient times and has been used as a pigment ever since.

The Sinner Bar welcomes you

Cinnabar has a lovely rich color, but there are just a couple of tiny problems. The first problem is that unlike Cinnabon, you don't just find cinnabar in every shopping mall. Ingenuity prevailed, and a synthetic way to produce pure cinnabar was discovered. The trick of heating a mixture of mercury and sulfur and then condensing the vapors was developed in China is the fourth century BC.

This did reduce the cost a bit, but there were a few other tiny problems. The second problem is that, unlike Cinnabon, Cinnabar contains mercury, and most all compounds with mercury in them are poisonous. 

Just a few men driven mad by mercury, the Mad Hatter, and Isaac Newton

But still, there is another little problem with the ore cinnabar when it comes to using it as a pigment. It has some issues with color management. First off, if one starts with the ore, the color depends on how it is prepared. The raw ore has to be ground into a powder, and the more finely it gets ground, the richer the color gets. Well, maybe that's not such a big problem. Particularly if you make the synthetic kind. Being formed through condensation, it is naturally in pretty tiny particles.

But then there is the issue of "fugitive colors". Fugitive colors are those pigments that change color over time. In this case, cinnabar is like Cinnabon. The color can degrade over time. Cinnabar turns to metacinnabar. It's the same mercury sulfide, but this particular form is black in color. Not so good to paint with. 

So, cinnabar can have a wonderful rich color, but it is expensive, poisonous, and can change color over time. Maybe not one's first choice?

A little entomological etymology

The words crimson, carmine, vermin, vermicelli, vermilion, and ingrained are all related through a little insect called kermes vermilio. These are soft scale insects that can be found in the Middle East and France. This little insect has been used to make a rich red colorfast dye since at least the Middle Ages. The dye was naturally named after the insect.

Kermit eating vermicelli, which has nothing to do with this narrative

The Latin name for the insect, kermes vermilio, literally means "worm worm". The first part, kermes, is derived from the Sanskrit word for worm, "krmih". Those clever Sanskritians added "ja" onto this word to make kmrih-ja, which means "red dye made from a worm". Kmrih-ja is where the English words crimson and carmine come from. The second part of the name, vermilio is derived from the Latin word vermis, meaning "worm", from which we get the modern words vermin and vermicelli. Isn't that appetizing?

Kermes vermilio, and the cute little larvae 

Ok, that brings together crimson, carmine, vermin and vermicelli. Next up? Vermilion. This little bug, the worm worm, was used to make a brilliant dye that was colorfast. Naturally, the dye was named after the insect. And... since the color of the dye was very similar to the color of cinnabar pigment, the two became linked. Technically, "cinnabar" is the name of the pigment made from mercury sulfide ore, and "vermilion" is the organic dye of that same color that is made from the kermes vermilio insect. 

I have one last word to tie in with this insect: ingrained. From the photo above, on the left, it can be seen that kermes has the look of a berry, or of grain on the branch. Although they are not actually part of the tree, it was quite natural in the Middle Ages to refer to these things that you made dye from as grains. Chaucer referred to a garment that was "dyed in grain", which meant, it was dyed red by virtue of our cute little friends.

Finally, ingrained. I said that the vermilion dye made from the kermes "grain" was colorfast, that is, it is firmly fixed. Hence the transition.

Three references were helpful in this...

Bright Earth, Art and the Invention of Color. by Philip Ball

Online Etymology Dictionary

Winsor and Newton Art Supply

Linking cinnabar and vermilion

So. We have two chemically different things: the inorganic pigment cinnabar and the organic pigment that the Sanskritters called kmrih-ja. Both come to be called vermilion. Throughout the Middle Ages, these names were used interchangeably. How did this come to be? 

How a term for an organic dye extracted from an insect became applied to an inorganic pigment made by alchemy is a puzzle that makes sense only within the context of the medieval view of coloration, whereby similarly colored substances of very different origin might end up with conflated names because hue was deemed to be closely linked to composition.

From Bright Earth, Art and the Invention of Color, by Philip Ball

I don't know about any of you, but henceforth I am going to only use "cinnabar" to refer to mercury sulfide, and vermilion to refer to that organic dye that came from the worm worm.

One last unanswered question

Years ago when I started this blog post, I had a basic question to answer. Is the artist's notion of the color vermilion a little more tightly constrained than that of the companies that make house paint?

Jean (Jean Kelly, the artist, remember her?) supplied me with links to three brands of vermilion paint that real artists might use. The companies are LeFranc and Bourgeois, Old Holland, and Holbein. The artist supply house Dick Blick provided pictures of actual paint as laid down with a brush. In order to make a fair comparison, I did a little bit of work and averaged the RGB values of ten dark pixels from each of the images in order to get a representation of that version of vermilion.

I went to one other source, just for comparison. A chap by the name of Nathan Moroney ran an online color name survey a few years back. The website got 1.3 zillion visits from people who were shown an RGB value and asked to name it. From the responses, he did quite a bit of data mining. As a result of his labor of love, you can go to his webpage, type in a color name, and it will tell you the group consensus for the RGB values.

Based on these three sources, I have redone the vermilion-ogram from the previous post. From this diagram, I think there is a consensus on what the word vermilion means. At least among real artists.

The definition of vermilion

Lena stood before her fish tank, assessing the wide range of colors, but she noticed one color that was not in her tank. "Gee, I yoost wish I had a vermilion fish."  Ollie replied "Vermilion? Holy cats, Lena! Where are we gonna get a fish tank big enough to hold dat many fish? You tink I'm a vermillionaire?"

Where's the vermilion fish?

Like Ollie, I think many of us are confused about the correspondence of color names to actual physical colors. Seymour’s dictum – any fancy-dancy color names have ambiguous definitions, that is, people will disagree about the color represented by the name. Vermilion sure sounds fancy-dancy to me.

In a previous post "Is my green the same as yours, revisited", I showed that there are at least four colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) that do not have ambiguous names. Does this apply to vermilion?

Dictionaries

Let's check the dictionaries.

Merriam Webster says vermilion is "Vivid reddish orange".

Dictionary.com says vermilion is "a brilliant scarlet red". But what is scarlet? They define scarlet  as "a bright-red color inclining toward orange". So according to this dictionary, vermilion is "a brilliant bright-red color inclining toward orange red".

Scarlett considers changing her name to Vermilion

Wikipedia favors us with the definition "brilliant red or scarlet". But again, what is scarlet? They define Scarlet as "bright red with a slightly orange tinge". So according to Wikipedia, vermilion is defined as "brilliant red or bright red with a slightly orange tinge".

The Free Dictionary calls vermilion "a vivid red to reddish orange".

There is some mild disagreement about the hue of the color. Is it red, orangeish red, or reddish orange? By some of the definitions, a vivid red could be called vermilion. That just confuses me. Why go to all the trouble of making up a word, without first checking if a suitable word already existed?

Based on the dictionary definitions, here is my expectation about what colors could be called vermilion.

Where does vermilion fall?

My conclusion so far is that it's okay for my wife and I to disagree when it comes to naming objects vermilion. When she says "What do you mean? THAT'S not vermilion!" all I need to do is point her to this blog post. "See Honey?  John the Math Guy agrees with me that vermilion is an ambiguous color name."

How about the paint companies?

One would think that paint companies would be an excellent source of a definitive definition of color names. Let's have a look online.

Here's something odd. There were quite a few paint companies (Valspar, Behr, Olympic, and Pittsburgh Paints) that offered "orange vermilion", but apparently don't sell straight vermilion. I left those out. Clearly if the name has a modifier, it could be a different color.

I went to the various websites selling these paints and jotted down the RGB values for what they called vermilion. The montage below shows various conceptions of "vermilion".

Will the real vermilion please stand up?

As I said, one would think that the paint companies would honor the true definitions of color names. One would think wrong.

My conclusion is that the dictionaries don't agree very well on the definition of vermilion and paint companies are even worse.


Webpages where I sampled color from:

Ultrect
Dutch Boy
Dulux
Art Paints
Glidden
Sherwin-Williams
Benjamin Moore
Dust Furniture
AccuMatch