Why orange spells danger, and other colourful tales

Like the albino whale of Moby Dick, white has an otherness to it. For a start, it’s tricky to make. You can’t reach it by mixing together other coloured paints, you have to begin with a special white pigment. And anything you add to that pigment will take it in only one direction: towards black.

Fortunately, artists have always had easy access to it thanks to one of the most popular pigments known to man, lead white. Despite being highly toxic, it remained the white of choice in art – and cosmetics – for centuries.

It wasn’t until the invention of titanium white, first massproduced in 1916, that lead was supplanted. Both brighter and more opaque than its rivals, sparkling titanium white is now in everything from tennis court markings to pills and toothpaste.

White has long been a symbol of money. Only the very wealthy could afford to keep the lace, linen cuffs, ruffs and cravats fashionable in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries pristine. Today, a snow-pale winter coat telegraphs a subtle visual brag: “I don’t need to take the bus.” In the West, brides wear it because it is also a colour symbolic of sexual purity, but in China it represents death and mourning.

The architectural fetish for white, imitating the bleached-bone colour of Greek and Roman ruins, is founded on a mistake. It was not until the mid-19th century that researchers discovered that classical statuary and buildings – such as the Venus de Milo – were usually brightly painted. Many Western aesthetes refused to believe it. The sculptor Auguste Rodin is said to have beaten his chest in sorrow: “I feel it here that they were never coloured.” Early artists struggled with yellow. Naples yellow often turned black on the canvas. Orpiment and gamboge, two other pigments, were highly poisonous. Others were unsavoury: Indian yellow was probably made from urine; gallstone yellow was made from ox gallstones ground in gum water.

In individuals, yellow means illness: jaundice or a bilious attack. Although the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear is the most notorious example of stigmatised yellow, other groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes from the early Middle Ages. Perversely, yellow has also been seen as a colour of beauty. In China, although “yellow” books are often pornographic, a particular eggyolk shade was the favoured colour of their emperors. A Tang dynasty text from the seventh century forbids “common people and officials” from wearing “clothes or accessories in reddish yellow”. Royal palaces were marked out by their yellow roofs.

From pink boys’ clothes to blue warpaint, Kassia St Clair reveals how the symbolism of seven key colours has changed

Those who have ever wondered which came first, the word for the colour or the name of the fruit, need wonder no longer: it was the fruit. Probably first cultivated in China, oranges gradually spread west, leaving its name scattered in its wake like a carelessly discarded whorl of peel: from nārang in Persian to nāranj in Arabic; then nāranga (Sanscrit), naranja (Spanish), orenge (French) and