Danielle Blog

Crayon colors

One of the things that J and I were talking about at supper was colors (of all things). We started discussing how we remembered colors getting retired when cerulean came out. I looked up some stuff on wikipedia and found some interesting info! Of course, I have artistic leanings, so I love colors.

Here is the link to the following info.

One of the things I told my friend, of which she was unaware, was how they used to have a color called “flesh” that was basically the skin tone of Caucasians. Here are some of the more interesting renaming of colors:

- flesh became peach
- indian red became chestnut – it was originally named for a color used in India, but school teachers reported that children thought it referred to the skin tones of Native Americans
- Prussian blue became midnight blue

They actually give you the RGB values if you want to choose them in photoshop (I think that you can type in the values, anyway!). Coolio!

Here is the retirement party that I am probably remembering that I found at this link:

1990: Eight Crayola crayon colors– Maize, Raw Umber, Lemon Yellow, Blue Gray, Orange Yellow, Orange Red, Green Blue and Violet Blue– are retired into the Crayola Hall of Fame in Easton, Pennsylvania. Emerson Moser, then Crayola’s most senior crayon moulder, also retired after 37 years. After moulding approximately 1.4 billion crayons, he revealed that he is actually color blind.

color blind???? How is that possible???
What a cool factoid to share with my Bio students when I talk about genetics and vision!

I think that I liked violet blue and green blue and was sad to see them go. But otherwise, I hadn’t used the colors they retired all that much.

I also really like these new names:

2003: Four more Crayola crayon colors– Blizzard Blue, Magic Mint, Mulberry and Teal Blue– are retired into the Crayola Hall of Fame, but are replaced by four new colors– Inch Worm, Jazzberry Jam, Mango Tango and Wild Blue Yonder.

Makes you want to go buy a box of 64 doesn’t it?