The Secret Lives of Color | 
pickI wasn‘t sure how interesting this would be but it was fascinating to read about the history of colours and the stories behind each one. Recommended!
My #Pantone2023 challenge so far….
@Clwojick
pickI found this an interesting history of various colors, shades, dyes, and hues. It makes a great reference or coffee table book.
pickMy last #Bookspin of 2022 was a great read! I‘ve seen several other nonfiction color anthologies since I bought this one a few years back, each with their own bent. And I‘d definitely be tempted to try one of the others as well. Especially the Pantone one. This one is a bit random in what info it sources and what colors it includes, but it skews heavily towards the history of color in fine art and politics. @TheAromaofBooks
From the Amber chapter:
“The Greeks called the gemstone ELEKTRON, associating it with light from the sun. (This is the origin of the English words ELECTRIC and ELECTRON.)”
I had no idea!
I had no idea that there was a controversy about yellow books that started in France in the mid 19th century and spread through Europe! Imagine if we still bound all our “sensationalist” material in a single color. It would probably be banned before it even got printed!
I learned so many fun facts from this book. Really enjoyed it. Link to an interesting episode of 99% Invisible with the author in the comments.
#OminousOctober #Orange
@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks
I saw some of you posting for this color challenge, so I thought I‘d see where my books fit so far in this #Pantone2022 challenge. Hopefully I‘m doing it right 😉. Thanks for another fun challenge @Clwojick and Litsy
Thank you so so much @mabell OMG this book is too beautiful!! And I‘m SOOO eager to try all of these amazing recipes with your loving notes!! Your “hosting gift” was beyond beyond thoughtful and I‘m so grateful!! So much fun reading and baking to look forward to!! #recipeswap
pickReally good book on color in art or materials used to make colors over the ages. Lots of trivia. Pages are colored!
pickThe authour is an adept storyteller. The colours discussed in the book attain an anthropomorphic quality as we read about them. It is not merely a chronicling of facts. It is a narration of history, facts, symbolisms, perceptions and science brought threaded together with a poetic language.
The book came to a close as beautifully as it began. It began and ended with two colours that we humans perceive as divine and beautiful and yet terrifying.
It was Shakespeare who cemented the relationship between green and envy. With The Merchant of Venice, written in the late 1590s, he gave us “green-eyed jealousy”; in Othello (1603), he has Iago mention “the green-ey‘d monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” - Kassia St.Clair
"Color can be found in the most unpromising of places." - Kassia St. Clair
It was an almost inconsequential sentence in the book but it made me wonder about what makes a place unpromising. Also we have a tendency to associate colours with a notion of positivity, so it seemed intriguing if taken in a literal sense...
As with most myths, this one contains a nub of truth overlaid with a great deal of embellishment.
In an article on baby clothes in the New York Times in 1893 the rule stated was that you should “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl.” Neither the author nor the woman in the shop whom she was interviewing were quite sure why, but the author hazarded a tongue-in-cheek guess. “[T]he boy‘s outlook is so much more roseate than the girl‘s,” she wrote, “that it is enough to make a girl baby blue to think of living a woman‘s life in the world.”
The author's take on Orange's personality is very intriguing...
Someone wearing a snow-pale winter coat telegraphs a subtle visual message: “I do not need to take public transportation.” - By Kassia St. Claire in The secret lives of colour.
The link between colors and social hierarchy in history often gets conveyed merely as a chronicle of facts. But I am enjoying these little quips that the author adds right after these facts. It adds to the quality of narration.
Van Gogh‘s paintings in Amsterdam over the past few years has shown that some of the chrome yellow in the flowers‘ petals has darkened significantly, due to the reaction of chrome yellow with other pigments in sunlight. Van Gogh‘s sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just as their real-life counterparts did.
#colours #secretlivesofcolour #kassia
The ephemerality of pigments and life.
"...Because of its link with light, white has laid deep roots in the human psyche and, like anything divine, can simultaneously inspire awe and instill terror in the human heart." - Secret Lives of Colour
#secretlivesofcolour #colours #colors
“I fell in love with colors in the way most people fall in love: while concentrating on something else.”
"Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream."
#secretlivesofcolors #colors
pickI absolutely loved this book! Having a design background, I was definitely interested in this book and learning more about the history of different colors. It was really cool learning how some of the colors got their names as well as how far back some of the colors dated. #color #colordesign #colortheory
pickDelightful! I had expected more cultural history and less pigment chemistry, and as a result, liked the more culture-focused chapters better, but it was all very interesting. A coworker who paints a lot in oil has already requested to borrow it. Thanks @silentrequiem !
Book still ok, people at the table next to me are talking paleo diets and I want to take a fucking sledge hammer to them because they don't fucking understand any part of human biology, macroevolution or gastroenterology, and especially not endocrinology.
Went to Umbria today as I was bored with coffee works' lack of pastries. Less photogenic table, but raspberry croissant (that leaked all over my hand but I'm not mad) so win. I'm going to make my coworker who paints read this book it's so much about the history of pigment creation.
Reading at the coffee shop with a breakfast burrito for dinner as Lucas is out for the night. We went to a much delayed birthday Afternoon Tea earlier today, and I was so stuffed I didn't eat a bit for five hours. Then I took down christmas and after this, I'm heading to the gym.
Footnote, mostly unrelated: I fucking hate American teeth, and American attitudes to dental stuff, so damn much. One of the pros of socialized health care is that providers won't do unnecessary shit; you wear braces if your bite requires it, not esthetics, you don't get to bleach your teeth. I hate when British actors with normal teeth get roles in the US and suddenly have horrible bluish sugar cubes. fucking gross & emblematic of US pop culture
Only a few pages in but really liking it so far! Also reminds me of fundamentally different the medieval mindset is to anything modern, and that I need to get back into A Distant Mirror.
Not exactly chilling, but the geeky artist in me was SO excited when I stumbled on this book at B&N! #chillingphotochallenge #oragnge #teamstoker @TheReadingMermaid
Loving this book by Kassia St. Clair. I was originally intrigued by after listening to the podcast by 99% Invisible: https://play.google.com/music/m/Dprkes2cosbnkpqfzvxcggwvpzi?t=340_The_Secret_Liv...
Easily my favorite read so far this year!
Such a gorgeous book! About to dive in!
Reading in bed on a Saturday morning .
I am loving this book. I'm learning something amazing on almost every colour I read about.
Roman Mars recently had author Kassia St Clair on his podcast to talk about colour. It‘s a delightful interview and you can listen here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-secret-lives-of-color/
pickI have to be honest and say I picked up this book because it looked so beautiful. Who says you shouldn‘t judge a book by its cover? 😉 I have then been enthralled by it. In it the author discusses the history, chemistry, societal effect, toxicity, manufacture, and individual examples of the use of over 70 colours divided into groups of whites, yellows, oranges, reds and so on. It sounds dry but she writes with such contagious interest - I loved it
#bellesbookishnewyear19 Day 19: “Book and fairy lights 🧚♂️🧚🏼♀️”
Well I don‘t have any fairy lights, so twinkle ones it is!
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I recently got this book, “the secret lives of color.” It tells you the origin for all the colors! It is amazing and beautiful. 🥰
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#writersofinstagram #reader #readersofinstagram #readers #twinklelights #thesecretlivesofcolour #authorsofinstagram #writersofinstagram
pickSuch a brilliantly designed book! Lovely, quiet, intriguing history of selected 75 colors. Perfect for dipping into and savoring a color at a time; but bet you can‘t stop at one unless you have immense willpower. So fascinating. A guilty and rare pleasure is going to this incredible pigment store: https://pigment.tokyo/article/detail?id=1 Now I have something to to enjoy at home!
Estate inventories show that in 1700, 33% of nobles‘ & 44% of officers‘ clothing was black; it was popular with domestics too, making up 29% of their wardrobes. At times the streets must have resembled Rembrandt‘s paintings Sampling Officials (1662) [above, from Internet] or Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632): crowds of identikit black-clad folk jostling for space.
Allusions to heliotrope also crop up in the works of JK Rowling, DH Lawrence, PG Wodehouse, James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. The word is pleasurable to say, filling the mouth like a rich, buttery sauce. Added to which, the colour itself is intriguing: antiquated, unusual and just a little bit brassy.
(Internet photo)
The deliciously immoral anti-heroine of Oscar Wilde‘s An Ideal Husband, Mrs Cheveley, makes her entrance in heliotrope and diamonds before swashbuckling her way through the remainder of the play and commandeering all the best lines.
(Internet photo)
pickI like what Simon Garfield said about this: “A mind-expanding tour of the world without leaving your paintbox.” It was fun to dip in and out of these short essays in between reading other things. Bonus #1: a fresh supply of amazing trivia to share with my friends. Bonus #2: this very cool cover with cut-out dots that reveal colours underneath. (Do you see how they cleverly match the words in the text?)
Perhaps the final word on the irrational dislike of green should go to Wassily Kandinsky: ‘Absolute green is the most anesthetising colour possible … similar to a fat cow, full of good health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and contemplating the world through its stupid, inexpressive eyes.‘
[Yikes! And who says a cow‘s eyes are inexpressive??]
