Whatever shade Shakespeare was picturing when he mentioned a “puke stocking” in Henry IV Part 1 is lost to history. You can probably chalk up the inconsistency to a lack of quality control in the 16th-century dye-making industry. In the 1530s, scholar Thomas Elyot pegged it as “betwene russet & black.” Several decades later, linguist John Florio mentioned “a deepe darke purple or puke colour”-so it was definitely pretty dark. The word came to describe the color those items were dyed, though there wasn’t one universal understanding of what that color actually was. Back in the 1500s, puke was a high-end wool cloth often used to make gowns and stockings. Not even goose-turd green can rival the ick-factor of a color called “ puke.” Thankfully, this one is unrelated to vomit. Its name was borrowed into English from the Italian zaffera in the 17th century, and is ultimately descended from the Latin word for “sapphire.” 16. Zaffre is the name of an ancient blue pigment originally produced by burning ores of cobalt in a furnace. Flame-of-burnt-brandy was just one of them, described in 1821 by one ladies’ magazine as a mixture of “lavender grey, pale yellow, and dark lilac.” Other equally evocative names dating from the same period include dragon’s blood (a deep purplish-red), d’oreille d’ours (a rich brown, literally “bear’s ears”), elephant’s breath (steel gray), and flamme de Vesuve ("the flame of Vesuvius," or the color of lava). Flame-of-Burnt-BrandyĪs the dyeing industry developed in the 19th century and was able to produce more and more colors, dressmakers and designers were left to concoct a whole range of weird and wonderful names for the new hues at their disposal. Navy officers who invented it-has been demonstrated in numerous experiments to have a calming influence, and so is often used in prisons and police holding cells to help keep the people inside relaxed and to discourage unruly behavior. This particular color-also known as Baker-Miller pink, after the two U.S. Mental Flossĭrunk-tank is the name of a bright shade of pink that has been the subject of a number of studies on the effects of colors on human temperament.
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