Thursday, April 19, 2018

Got the blues? Got the reds? Got the Yinmins?

My favorite color is now and always has been blue. Maybe it’s because I was the blue-eyed tow-head who – when the clothing wasn’t hand-me-down, which more often than not it was – was automatically assigned something blue. I was bummed that both my grammar and high school uniforms were forest green, not navy blue. I craved a blue-frosted birthday cake, but my mother didn’t approve of blue as a food color (other than blueberries and Easter eggs). One of the highlights of my childhood was attending a birthday party where not only did the cake have blue icing, but the ginger-ale was died blue, too.

And things haven’t changed all that much. I still gravitate towards blue clothing. My bedroom, foyer, hall, kitchen, and upstairs bathroom all are painted some shade of blue. Two chairs in the living room are blue. (What would my mother say? She didn’t like blue as a decorating color, either.)

I’m enough of a blue person that I’m relieved that, when they assigned a color to indicate the political leaning of a state, left-ish states got blue. (Phew!)

Although in many respects, I’m an oddball, my affection for blue is hardly unique:

It’s overwhelmingly America’s favorite color, according to Pressman of the Pantone Color Institute. “Blue is that concept of hope, promise, dependability, stability, calm, and cool,” she says. “We think of it as a color of constancy and truth. It’s one of the most approachable colors, the color that’s the most comfortable.” Blue is central to the brand imaging of Ikea, Ford, Walmart, and Facebook. It’s on our refrigerator shelves, our walls, our clothes. Two-thirds of Major League Baseball teams feature blue on their uniforms. Blue is everywhere. (Source: Bloomberg)

When it comes to blue, there’s an awful lot of choices out there. Having gone through not one but two Benjamin Moore fan decks when I picked the colors for my 2015 reno, I can vouch for that.

Despite my interest in things blue, I haven’t given a lot of thought to how we get all those color choices. Sure, I was in marketing so I know all about CYMK and Pantone PMS. All those formulae out there…But what’s really behind colors? Hmmmm.

As it turns out, there’s an awful lot, going way back in time, back to before there were MLB teams with some blue in their uniforms.

Blue is one of nature’s most abundant tones, but it’s proved hard for human hands to create. When the ancient Egyptians tried to replicate the deep, oceanic tone of ultramarine to adorn tombs, papyrus, and art, they wound up with something more like turquoise. During the Renaissance, ultramarine could be costlier than gold, because the lapis lazuli from which it derives was mined in remote Afghanistan. (Michelangelo nevertheless scored some for the Sistine Chapel ceiling.) The first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, or ferric ferrocyanide, wasn’t discovered until the early 18th century, by a German chemist trying to make red. Since then, many common blues (cerulean, midnight, aquamarine, smalt) have contained traces of cobalt, a suspected carcinogen.

So there are scientists who focus on developing new pigments. A pigment is “a substance capable of imparting color onto another material.” In other words, you need pigments to make colors. One such scientist is Mas Subramanian, who discovered/invented YInMn blue “the first blue pigment discovered in more than 200 years”. And a pigment that seems to be better, less dangerous, than the blues that are out there.

Pigments get patented, and can turn into big business. The pigment “responsible for the crisp whiteness of traffic lines, toothpaste, and powdered doughnuts” is worth a cool $13.2B per annum. The overall market for pigments is $30B. (Pretty good market share for that powdered doughnut pigment…)

YInMn is wending it’s way through the approval process – it has been approved for industrial coatings and plastics. And Crayola has recently introduced Bluetiful, its first new color in years, which is “inspired” by YInMn.

What might get in YInMn’s way of mass commercialization is that, because of the scarcity of one of its chemical components, it’s pretty pricey.

Anyway, price aside, blue seems to be on a good path. Not so red, which has always been something of a color problem child. Remember when they had to take red M&M’s out of the bag? And I learned from the article, the Red Coats who the embattled farmers took on at Lexington and Concord wore red coats “infused with crushed cochineal beetles.” Well, yuck.

More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity. Red 254, aka Ferrari red, for example, is safe and popular, but it’s also carbon-based, leaving it susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat…The world lacks a great all-around red. Always has.

Pigment scientists are working on it, but, as a non-red person – other than red Chuckles and jelly beans - I’m not all that concerned.

Red’s problem is just one more reason I’m happy to be blue.

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