Blue is a very prominent colour on earth. But when it comes to nature, blue is very rare. Less than 1 in 10 plants have blue flowers and far fewer animals are blue.
Blue is a color often found in nature, such as the pale blue of a daytime sky or the rich dark blue of a deep pool of water. It is for this reason, perhaps, that people often describe the color blue as calm and serene. Yet as a cool color, blue can sometimes seem icy, distant, or even cold.
There was no blue, not in the way that we know the color — it wasn't distinguished from green or darker shades. Geiger looked to see when "blue" started to appear in languages and found an odd pattern all over the world. Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light.
The Ancient Egyptians created the first blue pigment around 2,200 B.C. They heated a mixture of sand, ground limestone and copper-containing minerals like malachite or azurite at a high temperature. This process created an opaque blue glass that was crushed and combined with a thickening agent to make glaze and paint.
Some consider white to be a color, because white light comprises all hues on the visible light spectrum. And many do consider black to be a color, because you combine other pigments to create it on paper. But in a technical sense, black and white are not colors, they're shades. They augment colors.
Yet, here's the peculiar thing: as a physical object or property, most scientists agree that colour doesn't exist. When we talk about a colour, we're actually talking about the light of a specific wavelength; it's the combined effort of our eyes and brains that interprets this light as colour.
So why is that? Part of the reason is that there isn't really a true blue colour or pigment in nature and both plants and animals have to perform tricks of the light to appear blue. For plants, blue is achieved by mixing naturally occurring pigments, very much as an artist would mix colours.
Blue is the first and most dominant synthetic pigment of the ancient world. And it is entirely a human invention, which is why I agree with the singer Regina Spektor when she calls blue the “most human” color.
The colors change
It wasn't until the 1940s that manufacturers went in the opposite direction and decided that pink was for girls, and blue was for boys.
Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time. Click above to watch this video about why the sky is blue!
If colours were simply a naming scheme for wavelengths then pink is not one, because it is made up of more than one wavelength (it's actually a mix of red and purple light). If you took a laser and tuned it across the visible wavelengths, from infrared through to ultraviolet, you would not pass pink on the way.
Blue in parts of Europe, at least, had long been associated as a feminine colour because of the supposed colour of the Virgin Mary's outfit."
According to Conroy, the primary association of the color blue for most of recorded history was with truth a meaning that leaves a remnant in our language in the phrase "true blue." This was because blue is the color of a calm and clear sky, and it is in calm reflection that leads to truth.
Purple, not to be confused with violet, is actually a large range of colors represented by the different hues created when red, blue, or violet light mix. Purple is a color mixture, whereas violet is a spectral color, meaning it consists of a single wavelength of light.
Blue is generally a cool color in the spectrum and one of the rarest in nature as there aren't many naturally blue things. Yet, this royal shade represents calmness, responsibility, and trustworthiness, among others, in the color symbolism theory.
Scientists generally agree that humans began to see blue as a color when they started making blue pigments. Cave paintings from 20,000 years ago lack any blue color, since as previously mentioned, blue is rarely present in nature. About 6,000 years ago, humans began to develop blue colorants.
In fact, pink was even considered to be a masculine color. In old catalogs and books, pink was the color for little boys, said Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute.
Gender-neutral colours like yellow, white, brown, green and orange are great choices for boys and girls alike. Even better, all of these colours can be paired with various shades of blue or pink if desired.
Is yellow a “girl color” or “boy color?” Yellow is another gender-neutral color, but seems to be preferred slightly more by females than males. In clothing, yellow isn't as common as more popular colors like blue, green, or red.
Blue is one of the rarest of colors in nature. Even the few animals and plants that appear blue don't actually contain the color.
The first colour used in art was red - from ochre. And the first known example of cave art was a red ochre plaque, which contains symbolic engravings of triangles, diamond shapes and lines, dated to 75,000 years ago.
Actually, the sky was orange until about 2.5 billion years ago, but if you jumped back in time to see it, you'd double over in a coughing fit. Way back then, the air was a toxic fog of vicious vapors: carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, cyanide, and methane.
Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
Legendary is a soft, gray, millennial beige with a silvery undertone. It is a perfect paint color for a living room or exterior home.