Wild About Colour Nomenclature
Every year, Pantone releases their Colour of the Year, a trendsetting shade that is intended to, well, sell more paint, probably. 2024’s colour is Peach Fuzz, which looks exactly as you would imagine. But Peach Fuzz is known by another name, or rather, a number: 13-1023. Every one of the thousands of colours that Pantone describes has a unique number that describes how it fits within Pantone’s nomenclature of colours.
Today, Pantone is the leading colour nomenclature authority in the world. Their colours are the primary references, not only for paint, but for graphic design, fabric, cosmetics, plastics, and more. Knowing the pantone reference number allows for colour matching across different uses and among different artists, designers, and companies.
Pantone’s taxonomy of colour has evolved from a number of other historical nomenclatures, some of which date back to the 18th and 19th centuries and many of which were based on natural references, such as minerals, birds, and flowers. One the earliest of these is also the best known. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours was originally written by German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner in the late 1700s. It was adapted and expanded in 1821 by Patrick Syme, who added animal and vegetable reference samples to Werner’s original focus on geology.
Werner’s taxonomy is nowhere near as comprehensive as a modern system such as Pantone’s. It contains just 110 colours, but this small sample provides a charm that Peach Fuzz doesn’t quite match. Werner describes Ultramarine Blue as “the upper side of the wings of the small Heath Butterfly” while Blackish-Green is the “dark streaks on the leaves of the cayenne pepper.”
Werner’s system, and the ones that came after him, were intended primarily for use by artists and naturalists. Charles Darwin is said to have taken a copy of Werner’s Nomenclature on his voyage of The Beagle as a reference that he could use to describe the species he observed to a commonly understood standard.
While Werner’s system pioneered the way we think about colour names and taxonomy, it does beg some questions. Is your cayenne pepper plant the same colour as mine? For multi-hued minerals that Werner used, which part of the sample should we consider to be the reference colour? In many cases, Werner used the same reference object for multiple colours, muddying the waters of what a true representation of a particular colour might be.
Werner and other similar nomenclatures of the era worked well in circumstances where the user was comparing colours to identify or describe plant or animal species or were painting individual artworks. However, manufacturing requires a more precise understanding of colour and the need for standardization and systems like the one Werner designed have been overtaken by others that used more rigorous ways of determining colours. The longest lasting of these is the system developed by Albert H. Munsell in the early 20th century, which uses a combination of hue, lightness, and colour intensity to classify colours. The Munsell system is still in use today.
Classification systems like those developed by Munsell and Pantone combined with the manufacturing of dyes and pigments meant that mass production of products could be done with a standard colour palette. With these tools, manufacturers were able to offer products with an assurance that the colour would be true to the sample provided.
Standardizing and classifying colours is only part of the puzzle when it comes to colour. How we perceive colours presents different challenges. (I wrote more about colour perception here.) If you were online at all this week, you may have encountered a test that asked you to identify if colours were blue or green. Results for this test vary depending on the individual, the time of day, and the surrounding colours and other factors. Blue is blue, until it’s green, which presents a host of different obstacles for colour classification.
Pantone has a host of scientific instruments available to assist them in classifying colours that Werner could only dream about. But whether you call it Peach Fuzz or the streak of colour from the eye of the kingfisher, it’s orangey-pink either way.
