A Palette of Game-Changing Powers
If a color can change the world, that color might be Ultra Violet — at least for 2018.
The shade of purple was named color of the year because, according to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, it “communicates originality, ingenuity and visionary thinking.”
It is Pantone’s belief, and business model, that “colors exert powerful, often subliminal forces on the human mind,” Bruce Falconer wrote in The Times. Laurie Pressman, the company’s vice president, said their choice reflects what they think the world needs rather than the world as it is.
Ultra Violet is the most complex of all colors, Ms. Eiseman said, because it takes two shades that seem diametrically opposed and “brings them together to create something new.”
Those two colors, blue and red, have powers of their own.
One happy result of leaving the European Union, at least for Britons who backed the Brexit vote, will be the return of their blue passports. Since 1988, those documents have been burgundy, a dark shade of red, as a show of solidarity with the E.U. They are expected to revert to blue in October 2019.
“With the stakes high and the bones of contention abundant, many felt the burgundy passports represented the country’s unnecessary subjugation at the hands of Brussels,” Michael Wolgelenter wrote in The Times.
Nigel Farage, a Brexit advocate and former leader of the right-wing U.K. Independence Party, tweeted that the blue passports represent “becoming a proper country again. We are getting our individuality and national identity back.”
However, Mr. Wolgelenter noted, the country didn’t need Brexit to change the passports. The choice of color was always Britain’s. The European Union dictates some elements of the passports, the use of some shade of red was optional.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the British and other Europeans embraced another hue of red, Elisabeth Malkin wrote in The Times. Spain found a dye in Mexico that is extracted from a small parasite called the cochineal. The hue is so intense that it was more valuable than gold.
“The British, too, were captivated by cochineal,” Ms. Malkin said, “which was used to dye the wool cloth for army officers’ uniforms. As early as 1648, the English priest and traveler Thomas Gage wrote, ‘The English is like their sun, which is red, and so do and will affect to wear scarlet, as long as any cochineal is found in the Indies.’ ”
Cochineal, the subject of a recent exhibit in Mexico City, also entranced artists such as Van Gogh and became a symbol of power for royalty. “Louis XIV ordered the up- holstery of the chairs and the royal bed curtains at Versailles to be dyed with cochineal,” Ms. Malkin wrote. “So rich was the trade that cochineal was second only to silver as the most valuable export from Spain’s American colonies.”
Pastels might express different motives, however. If a color can have so much power, some people use the dilution of pigment to announce that they would prefer to ignore the world than save it.
“Pastels’ atavistic connotations,” Alice Gregory wrote in The Times, “have been subsumed, like so much else, by ironic self-awareness and maybe even by a subtle sense of tragedy.”
While red might signal a clear rebellion, pastels express a more subtle insurrection.
“Black seems too obvious — and too resigned,” Ms. Gregory wrote. “Wearing pastels feels like re-appropriating a slur. ‘ Who’s the naïf now?’ they seem to whisper, while remaining unsure whether anyone can hear.”