__NOTOC__

Powder blue is a pale shade of blue. As with most colours, there is no absolute definition of its exact hue. Originally, ''powder blue'', in the 1650s, was powdered

smalt Cobalt glass—known as "smalt" when ground as a pigment—is a deep blue coloured glass prepared by including a cobalt compound, typically cobalt oxide or cobalt carbonate, in a glass melt. Cobalt is a very intense colouring agent and very littl ...

(cobalt glass) used in laundering and

dye A dye is a colored substance that chemically bonds to the substrate to which it is being applied. This distinguishes dyes from pigments which do not chemically bind to the material they color. Dye is generally applied in an aqueous solution an ...

ing applications, and it then came to be used as a colour name from 1894. Smalt has a deep, dark

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when obs ...

hue In color theory, hue is one of the main properties (called Color appearance model#Color appearance parameters, color appearance parameters) of a color, defined technically in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a Stimulus (physiology ...

, but powder blue nowadays is a pale cobalt blue as illustrated by the examples below, which show powder blue as defined by

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

and

Australian Standard Standards Australia is a standards organisation established in 1922 and is recognised through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Australian government as the primary non-government standards development body in Australia. It is a c ...

s for paint colours along with an example of one manufacturer's actual Powder Blue paint, and a consensus definition produced by an online colour names survey in which 140,000 people took part. The sources differ on how pale or saturated a colour it is, but broadly agree on the hue. ''Powder blue'' was also used as a colour name in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

in 1774, but the exact colour is unclear: it may be a blue-grey or a dark unsaturated blue.Maerz and Paul ''A Dictionary of Color'' New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 202. See colour sample of powder blue, Page 95--Plate 36 Color Sample H2 and Plate 43 Color Sample D11

Web colour

In contrast to the above examples, the list of

X11 color names In computing, on the X Window System, X11 color names are represented in a simple text file, which maps certain strings to RGB color values. It was traditionally shipped with every X11 installation, hence the name, and is usually located in ''<X ...

defines ''powder blue'' as a pale

cyan Cyan () is the color between green and blue on the visible spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a predominant wavelength between 490 and 520 nm, between the wavelengths of green and blue. In the subtractive color system, or CMYK color ...

shade, RGB(176,224,230), as shown here. This is the colour which is displayed by web browsers if "powder blue" is specified in HTML or CSS code.W3C TR CSS3 Color Module, HTML4 color keywords
/ref>

Crayola colour

Displayed at right is the colour that is called "powder blue" in Crayola crayons. This colour was introduced for the Colors of Kindness set in 2022.

References

External links

Smalt
at Web Exhibits' Pigments Through the Ages {{Shades of blue, Powder Shades of blue

Web colour

Crayola colour

See also

References

External links