💜Purple: The true colors of the world's most powerful shade

If you’re in the pink, all is well; if you’re in the red, you’ve got some work to do. A blue day is a bad one; a black day is worse. A yellow streak suggests cowardice, green eyes mean envy, and a little white lie never hurt anyone. But how about purple? This vibrant shade runs the spectrum—it’s at once the go-to shade for [Catholic bishops]( and a symbol of louche eroticism. (One [British study]( found that people with purple bedrooms have almost twice as much sex as people with grey ones.) To some, purple says magic—it’s the shade of Dumbledore’s cloak, [witches’ front doors]( and [Pagan Pride](. To others, it’s [the house color]( of womanism, or Black feminism, and the [LGBT movement]( “a blend of the traditionally gender-identified colors pink and blue.” In ancient times, purple was the color of royalty, forbidden to the plebs, and Cleopatra’s alleged favorite color. In recent years, it’s become a byword for a veritable medicine cabinet of [mostly]( [illegal]( [drugs](. Thanks to its paradoxical nature in these uncertain times, purple is so hot right now. Ultra Violet—a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple”—is color forecaster [Pantone]( [shade of the year]( chosen because it “communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking.” (Whether it communicates “purple” [is another question]( So let’s take a closer look at this sensuous shade. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( Sponsored by [Quartz Obsession] Purple September 07, 2018 No shrinking violet! --------------------------------------------------------------- If you’re in the pink, all is well; if you’re in the red, you’ve got some work to do. A blue day is a bad one; a black day is worse. A yellow streak suggests cowardice, green eyes mean envy, and a little white lie never hurt anyone. But how about purple? This vibrant shade runs the spectrum—it’s at once the go-to shade for [Catholic bishops]( and a symbol of louche eroticism. (One [British study]( found that people with purple bedrooms have almost twice as much sex as people with grey ones.) To some, purple says magic—it’s the shade of Dumbledore’s cloak, [witches’ front doors]( and [Pagan Pride](. To others, it’s [the house color]( of womanism, or Black feminism, and the [LGBT movement]( “a blend of the traditionally gender-identified colors pink and blue.” In ancient times, purple was the color of royalty, forbidden to the plebs, and Cleopatra’s alleged favorite color. In recent years, it’s become a byword for a veritable medicine cabinet of [mostly]( [illegal]( [drugs](. Thanks to its paradoxical nature in these uncertain times, purple is so hot right now. Ultra Violet—a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple”—is color forecaster [Pantone]( [shade of the year]( chosen because it “communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking.” (Whether it communicates “purple” [is another question]( So let’s take a closer look at this sensuous shade. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( By the digits [2:14:]( Length in minutes of Sheb Wooley’s novelty hit, [“The Purple People Eater.”]( (The eponymous hero has come to Earth seeking “a job in a rock ‘n roll band.”) [4.5:]( Length in inches of the purple honeycreeper, a brightly colored bird native to much of South America. Only the males are purple. [7:]( Hardness grade of amethyst, a semi-precious purple [quartz](. [31:]( Maximum height in feet of a purple mangosteen tree. [12,000:]( Estimated number of shellfish needed to make 1.5 grams of Tyrian purple dye. [#800080:]( Hex triplet of purple. It’s 50% red, 50% blue. [$900,000:]( Purchase price of Purple.com, once the oldest known single-serving site—just one page of purple. The domain was sold to mattress company Purple Inc. in late 2017. Musée Marmottan Monet Pop Quiz What was the name given to the Impressionists’ obsession with purple? ViolettomaniaMauve madnessThe purple perilIndigo insanity Correct. Edouard Manet claimed it was the real color of the atmosphere: “Fresh air is violet. Three years from now, the whole world will work in violet.” Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. Sponsored by David Yurman Where sculpture and ingenuity meet --------------------------------------------------------------- David Yurman merges art with innovation, transforming the earth’s gemstones and precious metals into distinctive bands with engineered precision and modern alchemy.[Explore David Yurman’s classic and contemporary bands]( Brief history Purple’s royal origins --------------------------------------------------------------- Around the first century BC, Rome’s ancient leaders wore robes in Tyrian purple, allegedly the color of [clotted blood](. It’s from here that we get purple’s association with power and royalty, giving rise to the expression “born in the purple.” But it didn’t pay to look too close. [To make the dye]( you have to mix the “fluids” of two species of mollusk, Thais haemastoma and Murex brandaris. The product was vividly colored, but also incredibly stinky. (It’s no surprise that most dyeworks were on the edges of town.) Throughout the Roman empire, shellfish juice would be placed in a vat of stale urine and left to steep for 10 days. When Constantinople fell in 1453, the secret to manufacturing the dye went with it, likely preventing the shellfish from being entirely wiped out. It wasn’t until 1856 that the dye was rediscovered, when French marine biologist [Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers]( stumbled upon the purple innards of the Murex. You can see how it’s done in this video. Timeline [1574:]( Elizabethan sumptuary laws forbid anyone outside of the British royal family from wearing purple. [1908:]( British, and then American, suffragettes adopt purple as one of their three signature colors. [1928:]( Harlem Renaissance writer Marita Bonner publishes The Purple Flower, a one-act play about racial relations widely cited as her masterpiece. [1932:]( The modern Purple Heart award is revived, having originated in the waning days of the American Revolution. Some 137 World War I veterans receive the distinction. [1953:]( Purple tickets are issued to the coronation of British monarch Elizabeth II. [1961:]( British poet [Jenny Joseph]( publishes ‘Warning,’ the country’s “[most popular]( post-war poem.” It starts: ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.’ [1969:]( Members of the Gay Liberation Front protest outside the San Francisco Examiner offices, leaving purple handprints across downtown San Francisco in a “visible demonstration of gay power.” [1982:]( American author Alice Walker publishes her epistolary novel, The Color Purple. The next year, it wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. [1984:]( American recording artist Prince releases what many consider his opus, the soundtrack album Purple Rain. It tops the Billboard 200 for an astounding 24 weeks. [1989:]( South African police spray thousands of anti-apartheid protesters with a police cannon filled with purple dye, inspiring [the protest slogan]( “The purple shall govern.” [2011:]( French bureaucrats coin the term “the purple economy,” a feature of sustainable development which “relies on the cultural dimension to give value to goods and services.” Department of jargon The palpable pleasure of purple prose --------------------------------------------------------------- A much-used pejorative phrase from high school English teachers and sharp-quilled editors, “purple prose” is writing or speech “characterized by ornate, flowery, or hyperbolic language.” This expression comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica, c. 19 BC, in which he castigates texts that feature “one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam/Far and wide,” before warning: “There’s no place for them here.” But not everyone has been as down on it. According to writer and logophile Charles Harrington Ester, purple prose wasn’t always a bad thing. The change came, [he writes]( when Americans’ vocabulary and reading comprehension began to deteriorate in the 20th century, resulting in “a campaign against prose that displayed royalty, grandeur, and power. This led to the disappearance of the semicolon, the invention of the sentence fragment, and a marked increase in the use of words like methodological.” Whatever the cause, many are still content to be its champion. In 1985, novelist Paul West wrote a defense of purple prose in the [New York Times](. His thesis? “A writer who can’t do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks.” [Click here for a purple-themed Spotify playlist]( Flag fact! Dominica 🇩🇲, the Caribbean island, is one of only [two countries]( with purple [on its flag]( on the head and breast of the very fine sisserou parrot. (The other is the [Northern Mariana Islands]( science says But does it really exist? --------------------------------------------------------------- Not if we’re to believe Isaac Newton. That’s because the color purple doesn’t have its own unique wavelength of light, unlike its near cousin violet. Physicists and color theorists call colors like these non-spectral colors. “They are not part of the spectrum of white light, writes biophysicist Pupa Gilberti in [Physics in the Arts](