4 Hot Hues for an On-Trend Fall: Smaragdine, Fulvous, Coquelicot, Wenge

Smaragdine is emerald, and it was Pantone’s Color of the Year in 2013. Fulvous is owl-or-duck-colored, coquelicot is poppy-colored, wenge is wood. Seven more cool colors over at Mental Floss.

It’s nice to think about color stuff, like how in Japan kids will draw the sun as red rather than yellow, and how their word for blue is used for what we in the West might call “smaragdine.” (I also love that the Japanese word for green is “midori.”) In 1969, two anthropologists named Brent Berlin and Paul Kay wrote a book theorizing that “as languages evolve, they acquire new basic color terms in a strict chronological sequence” — first white/black, then red, then green/yellow, and so on. Separate terms for purple, pink, orange and brown emerge only after the language distinguishes between green and blue, which quite a few languages still do not do. Colors are crazy!

Here’s a chart of Crayola crayon evolution from 1903-present.