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[UPDATED] Sources

Hartley, Florence. The Ladies Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness; a Complete Handbook for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society. Boston, G. W. Cottrell, 1860.

Hirsch, Emil G., Levias, Caspar. “Color.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

JohnDecember.com. “Hue, Saturation, and Light Color Codes (Hue at 30° of Separation).”

“Mourning – Victorian Era.” 2018 Australian Museum. Past Exhibitions (Death: the Last Taboo), November 21, 2018.

The Physics Classroom. “Light Waves and Color, Lesson Two: Color and Vision – Color Subtraction.”

Syme, Patrick. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours; Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts. Edinburgh, William Blackwood; London, T. Cadell, Strand, 1821.

Higher Vibrations in Higher Education

Listen to Samantha Harden, PhD., and me discuss how to talk to the press if you’re a scientist (or a regular human). And I soft announce the launch of my media training program.

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) highlights my work for Philadelphia Magazine…

A central thesis to Arthaus’s design is maximizing natural light, fresh air, and nature, and Meredith Lindemon, the article’s author, notes it does so “without gobbling up all the real estate outside.” … .

“Meredith pays particular attention to the playful use of color, to which KPF Principal and design lead for Arthaus Josh Chaiken shared, “I think ‘engineering’ sounds too precise, but you can evoke a response through the use of light and color.”

Grey

I decided to undertake a personal project of learning how to paint in a Trompe L’oeil fashion. Was I good at it? No. I was not. However, I wasn’t terrible at it, and it was fun so I decided this undertaking was worth it. I painted over a metal fire escape ladder thing in an old apartment building in Philadelphia that probably should have been condemned.

Grey is the color I like for these sorts of projects. And, today, I’m going to end this post here because I think it’s better to show than tell my lackluster skills at Trompe L’oeil in showing an example of it that’s not terrible only in that it illustrates the point I’m trying to make far better than I can articulate.

Violet Purple

If you were a girl child in the 1980s, then your favorite color was violet purple—and also carnation pink. At least these were my favorite colors, and the favorite colors of all my little girl friends. I don’t know if I actually liked them though, because I do not like these colors today and so perhaps my love of purple and pink as a child was the result of societal pressures to conform, or what have you. Also, if you had a girl child, you’d dress them up in pink and purple clothes, and set them loose on the world like a pack of little, grape jelly-looking monsters.

Violet purple is the color of not so many things found in the natural world. Of course, the color is in the violet flower and the Purple Astor, but not so much in animals or birds. Violet purple is also the color of the amethyst mineral.

The god Amethystos was the Greek god invoked by the amethyst. Wearing an amethyst was supposed to protect the wearer from drunkenness resulting from drinking too much wine. Wine, also purple, was perhaps canceled out by the color of the amethyst, and turned to water—who knows really. A miracle.

Emerald Green

This is not to say that everybody “has to be the same thing”, but rather that people might help themselves if they could accept that there are people in this world that don’t share the same spiritual beliefs. Because this is a fact. And then, just, basically, if everyone went about their own spiritual business as if it’s a sacred, private thing that’s above being rammed where it isn’t wanted. The Divine Name is not to be treated with this disgusting sort of belligerence, to be thrown around and shoved down a throat. At least, that’s my opinion.

This is the tricky thing about a common morality as opposed to a collective spirituality: to one form of spiritual belief, a moral code may be as foundational as it is irrelevant to another. So, in my opinion, again, it seems that it’s necessary to embrace a collective spirituality, to ensure cohesion in society, to sustain communities of diverse ideas and to develop tolerance for ephemera that don’t all originate in the same person’s head. Anyway, the emerald.

Berlin Blue

Berlin Blue composes the base of every other recorded color of blue, that Werner named in his Nomenclature. It also creates the secondary set of blues that Werner named as foundational, which include Greenish Blue (Sky Blue) and Greyish Blue (Cobalt Glass).

It is interesting to note that, in nature, the blues often appear on the feathers of birds or in copper ore, from the earth. Berlin Blue is basically a lighter, cooler Prussian Blue, which has more black and a bit of a mid-blue, which is indigo, folded together. Indigo and Prussian Blues are both found in Blue Copper Ore, Prussian also in cyanide. But Berlin Blue is the color of an untreated Sapphire.

Crimson

Red is not a color that I wear often. It means too many different things. I think that I read that Louboutin uses the color for the soles of their shoes because it is an auspicious color. To me, red shoes mean something different. Crimson is a color associated with silk as well as blood. To me, it has a certain weirdness that comes from its being slightly silvery, and from the word itself—how it sounds slightly silvery. To me, it sounds and looks a bit like oil. I absolutely hate it.

Crimson, according to “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour”, has the base of Carmine Red, which has the base of Lake Red and a bit of Arterial Blood Red. Crimson also contains Indigo Blue, which is a bit more than half blue-green, is mostly purple, contains no yellow, and is about a third black. Carmine is a bright orange-red, a warm hue that’s entirely red and blue, not at all green, and contains no black. Lake Red contains a bit of Berlin Blue, an ashy grey blue that is about half greenish-blue, and then reddish-blue and then black.

Velvet Black

Black: the color of discretion and modesty. Of authority. Of sin and death. Velvet Black, the basis of all the black tints, my favorite kind of black—my favorite color. This particular black is not absolute, but it is foundational. There is still enough red, and not a complete degree of blackness, to be capable of subtracting other colors to create a warm or cool tint.

There’s a mystical nature to black that’s also the basis of the way people did talk about color in the Biblical Hebrew. I think it was interesting that, while no language for individual colors existed—like red, blue, etc., until some time quite later, but color was referred to by the way it captured light or reflected it (among other ways).

Créme de l’Enclos

It should be obvious to anyone why milk is good for the skin, so I won’t go into it (but it’s because it’s a cream). The lemon juice works as an exfoliant and the spirits of wine, combined with everything else, creates butter milk with grain alcohol in it. I guess that makes the buttermilk maybe a bit flammable—because when you mix grain alcohol with sugar and acid, you basically get fuel.