CW: Death, Desecration of Corpses
As we all know, color matters. And color can inspire a lot of controversy. Like, for example, certain pinks? They have baggage. Baggage that could be very expensive, very fast. M manages to keep it to a single parter this time (woah!) and we get to discuss a sampling of colors that sparked a bit of problems.
First we talked about Vantablack by Surrey NanoSystems. Everyone associated Vantablack with Anish Kapoor with the color, but he just bought the rights to it, which is what caused the whole controversy. Here’s an article about the material and controversy.
After the whole issue with Anish Kapoor having exclusive right to Vantablack, Stuart Semple made the world’s pinkest pink and said everyone could uses it but Anish Kapoor. All this explained in the last link. But here’s a link to that too.
We also talked about Crayola’s Flesh crayon, which you can imagine was a huge problem when it’s only that pinkish Caucasian color. Crayola renamed their Flesh crayon to Peach in 1963 to coincide with the Civil rights movement and then much later started doing their multicultural boxes where you could get tons of different colors for skins of all tones.
From there we talked about the practice of using ground up mummies – yes, real mummies – to make paint pigments in the Victorian period. It was a widespread practice and lots of paintings you’ve probably enjoyed in museums have these pigments in them. In the slideshow below, this is a swatch of pigments made using ground up mummies and then a small selection of paintings that extensively used Mummy Brown.
Finally, we talked about how you can trademark colors. Like how Barbie has Barbie Pink and no one else is allowed to use that specific shade of pink. Or Target has Target Red and no one else can use that specific shade of red. Here’s an article on that.
Stuart Semple, of the pinkest pink, came back by making such colors as Tiff Blue (like Tiffany Blue) and Pinkie (a very Barbie shade of pink).
And we didn’t talk about this on the episode, but as a bonus, Stuart Semple is also liberating the Pantone colors. Several years back, Pantone is no longer available in Adobe products and you have to buy it separate. This can sometimes be a huge cost to artists, and Stuart Semple views this as unacceptable. So he made Freetone, and is just giving all those colors to you to use in any product you want to use them in for free. So if you need them, download and use them at will.
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