Purple bellpepper.jpg

Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, purples are created with a combination of red and blue pigments. In the CMYK color model used in printing, purples are made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both.

Purple has long been associated with royalty, originally because Tyrian purple dye, made from the mucus secretion of a species of snail, was extremely expensive in antiquity. Purple was the color worn by Roman magistrates; it became the imperial color worn by the rulers of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and later by Roman Catholic bishops. Similarly in Japan, the color is traditionally associated with the emperor and aristocracy.

According to contemporary surveys in Europe and the United States, purple is the color most often associated with rarity, royalty, magic, mystery, and piety. When combined with pink, it is associated with eroticism, femininity, and seduction.

Etymology and definitions

The modern English word ''purple'' comes from the Old English ''purpul,'' which derives from Latin ''purpura'', which, in turn, derives from the Greek (''porphura''), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail. The first recorded use of the word ''purple'' dates to the late 900s AD.

Relationship to violet

Purple is closely associated with violet. In common usage, both refer to a variety of colors between blue and red in hue. Historically, purple has tended to be used for redder hues and violet for bluer hues. In optics, violet is a spectral color; it refers to the color of any different single wavelength of light on the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, between approximately 380 and 450 nanometers, whereas purple is the color of various combinations of red, blue, and violet light, some of which humans perceive as similar to violet.

In art, history, and fashion

In prehistory and the ancient world: Tyrian purple

Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic era. The artists of Pech Merle cave and other Neolithic sites in France used sticks of manganese and hematite powder to draw and paint animals and the outlines of their own hands on the walls of their caves. These works have been dated to between 16,000 and 25,000 BC.

As early as the 15th century BC the citizens of Sidon and Tyre, two cities on the coast of Ancient Phoenicia (present day Lebanon), were producing purple dye from a sea snail called the spiny dye-murex.Ball, Philip, ''Bright Earth; Art and the Invention of Colour''. p. 290 Clothing colored with the Tyrian dye was mentioned in both the '' Iliad'' of Homer and the '' Aeneid'' of Virgil. The deep, rich purple dye made from this snail became known as Tyrian purple.

The process of making the dye was long, difficult and expensive. Thousands of the tiny snails had to be found, their shells cracked, the snail removed. Mountains of empty shells have been found at the ancient sites of Sidon and Tyre. The snails were left to soak, then a tiny gland was removed and the juice extracted and put in a basin, which was placed in the sunlight. There, a remarkable transformation took place. In the sunlight the juice turned white, then yellow-green, then green, then violet, then a red which turned darker and darker. The process had to be stopped at exactly the right time to obtain the desired color, which could range from a bright crimson to a dark purple, the color of dried blood. Then either wool, linen or silk would be dyed. The exact hue varied between crimson and violet, but it was always rich, bright and lasting.

Tyrian purple became the color of kings, nobles, priests and magistrates all around the Mediterranean. It was mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament); in the Book of Exodus, God instructs Moses to have the Israelites bring him an offering including cloth "of blue, and purple, and scarlet," to be used in the curtains of the Tabernacle and the garments of priests. The term used for purple in the 4th-century Latin Vulgate version of the Bible passage is ''purpura'' or Tyrian purple. In the '' Iliad'' of Homer, the belt of Ajax is purple, and the tails of the horses of Trojan warriors are dipped in purple. In the '' Odyssey'', the blankets on the wedding bed of Odysseus are purple. In the poems of Sappho (6th century BC) she celebrates the skill of the dyers of the Greek kingdom of Lydia who made purple footwear, and in the play of Aeschylus (525–456 BC), Queen Clytemnestra welcomes back her husband Agamemnon by decorating the palace with purple carpets. In 950 BC, King Solomon was reported to have brought artisans from Tyre to provide purple fabrics to decorate the Temple of Jerusalem.

Alexander the Great (when giving imperial audiences as the basileus of the Macedonian Empire), the basileus of the Seleucid Empire, and the kings of Ptolemaic Egypt all wore Tyrian purple.

The Roman custom of wearing purple togas may have come from the Etruscans; an Etruscan tomb painting from the 4th century BC shows a nobleman wearing a deep purple and embroidered toga.

In Ancient Rome, the ''Toga praetexta'' was an ordinary white toga with a broad purple stripe on its border. It was worn by freeborn Roman boys who had not yet come of age, curule magistrates,
certain categories of priests, and a few other categories of citizens.

The ''Toga picta'' was solid purple, embroidered with gold. During the Roman Republic, it was worn by generals in their triumphs, and by the Praetor Urbanus when he rode in the chariot of the gods into the circus at the Ludi Apollinares. During the Empire, the ''toga picta'' was worn by magistrates giving public gladiatorial games, and by the consuls, as well as by the emperor on special occasions.

During the Roman Republic, when a triumph was held, the general being honored wore an entirely purple toga bordered in gold, and Roman Senators wore a toga with a purple stripe. However, during the Roman Empire, purple was more and more associated exclusively with the emperors and their officers. Suetonius claims that the early emperor Caligula had the King of Mauretania murdered for the splendour of his purple cloak, and that Nero forbade the use of certain purple dyes. In the late empire the sale of purple cloth became a state monopoly protected by the death penalty.

According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ, in the hours leading up to his crucifixion, was dressed in purple (πορφύρα: ''porphura'') by the Roman garrison to mock his claim to be ' King of the Jews'.

The actual color of Tyrian purple seems to have varied from a reddish to a bluish purple. According to the Roman writer Vitruvius, (1st century BC), the murex shells coming from northern waters, probably ''Bolinus brandaris'', produced a more bluish color than those of the south, probably '' Hexaplex trunculus''. The most valued shades were said to be those closer to the color of dried blood, as seen in the mosaics of the robes of the Emperor Justinian in Ravenna. The chemical composition of the dye from the murex is close to that of the dye from indigo, and indigo was sometimes used to make a counterfeit Tyrian purple, a crime which was severely punished. What seems to have mattered about Tyrian purple was not its color, but its luster, richness, its resistance to weather and light, and its high price.

In modern times, Tyrian purple has been recreated, at great expense. When the German chemist Paul Friedander tried to recreate Tyrian purple in 2008, he needed twelve thousand mollusks to create 1.4 ounces of dye, enough to color a handkerchief. In the year 2000, a gram of Tyrian purple made from ten thousand mollusks according to the original formula cost two thousand euros.

China

In ancient China, purple was obtained not through the Mediterranean mollusc, but purple gromwell. The dye obtained did not easily adhere to fabrics, making purple fabrics expensive. Purple became a fashionable color in the state of Qi (齊, 1046 BC–221 BC) because its ruler, Qin Shi Huang, developed a preference for it. As a result, the price of purple fabric was over five times that of plain fabric. His minister, Guan Zhong (管仲), eventually convinced him to relinquish this preference.

China was the first culture to develop a synthetic purple color.Thieme, C. 2001. (translated by M. Will) Paint Layers and Pigments on the Terracotta Army: A Comparison with Other Cultures of Antiquity. In: W. Yongqi, Z. Tinghao, M. Petzet, E. Emmerling and C. Blänsdorf (eds.) ''The Polychromy of Antique Sculptures and the Terracotta Army of the First Chinese Emperor: Studies on Materials, Painting Techniques and Conservation.'' Monuments and Sites III. Paris: ICOMOS, 52–57.

An old hypothesis suggested links between the Chinese purple and blue and Egyptian blue, however, molecular structure analysis and evidence such as the absence of lead in Egyptian blue and the lack of examples of Egyptian blue in China, argued against the hypothesis. The use of quartz, barium, and lead components in ancient Chinese glass and Han purple and Han blue has been used to suggest a connection between glassmaking and the manufacture of pigments,FitzHugh, E. W. and Zycherman, L. A. 1983. An Early Man-Made Blue Pigment from China: Barium Copper Silicate. ''Studies in Conservation'' 28/1, 15–23. and to prove the independence of the Chinese invention. Taoist alchemists may have developed Han purple from their knowledge of glassmaking.

Lead is used by the pigment maker to lower the melting point of the barium in Han Purple.

Purple was regarded as a secondary color in ancient China. In classical times, secondary colors were not as highly prized as the five primary colors of the Chinese spectrum, and purple was used to allude to impropriety, in contrast to crimson, which was deemed a primary color and symbolized legitimacy. Nevertheless, by the 6th century CE, purple was ranked above crimson. Several changes to the ranks of colors occurred after that time.

File:Egyptian - Faience Bowl - Walters 48451 - Interior.jpg, An Egyptian bowl colored with Egyptian blue, with motifs painted in dark manganese purple. (between 1550 and 1450 BC)
File:Contemporary portrayal of a toga picta.jpg, Painting of a man wearing an all-purple ''toga picta'', from an Etruscan tomb (about 350 BC).
File:Compitalia fresco.jpg, Roman men wearing ''togae praetextae'' with reddish-purple stripes during a religious procession (1st century BC).
File:Purple_Purpur_(retouched).jpg, Different purple hues obtained from three types of sea snails
File:Purpurküpe.jpg, Dye bath of Tyrian purple
File:Purpur-mit-Ausfaerbung.png, Cloth dyed with Tyrian purple. The color could vary from crimson to deep purple, depending upon the type of murex sea-snail and how it was made.

Purple in the Byzantine Empire and Carolingian Europe

Through the early Christian era, the rulers of the Byzantine Empire continued the use of purple as the imperial color, for diplomatic gifts, and even for imperial documents and the pages of the Bible. Gospel manuscripts were written in gold lettering on parchment that was colored Tyrian purple.
Empresses gave birth in the Purple Chamber, and the emperors born there were known as "born to the purple," to separate them from emperors who won or seized the title through political intrigue or military force. Bishops of the Byzantine church wore white robes with stripes of purple, while government officials wore squares of purple fabric to show their rank.

In western Europe, the Emperor Charlemagne was crowned in 800 wearing a mantle of Tyrian purple, and was buried in 814 in a shroud of the same color, which still exists (see below). However, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the color lost its imperial status. The great dye works of Constantinople were destroyed, and gradually scarlet, made with dye from the cochineal insect, became the royal color in Europe.

File:Theodora mosaic - Basilica San Vitale (Ravenna) v2.jpg, The Empress Theodora, the wife of the Emperor Justinian I, dressed in Tyrian purple. (6th century).
File:11th century Byzantine griffins.gif, 11th-century Byzantine robe, dyed Tyrian purple with murex dye. Creatures are griffins
File:Karl den store krons av leo III.jpg, A medieval depiction of the coronation of the Emperor Charlemagne in 800. The bishops and cardinals wear purple, and the Pope wears white.
File:Shroud of Charlemagne manufactured in Constantinople 814.jpg, A fragment of the shroud in which the Emperor Charlemagne was buried in 814. It was made of gold and Tyrian purple from Constantinople.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance

In 1464, Pope Paul II decreed that cardinals should no longer wear Tyrian purple, and instead wear scarlet, from kermes and alum, since the dye from Byzantium was no longer available. Bishops and archbishops, of a lower status than cardinals, were assigned the color purple, but not the rich Tyrian purple. They wore cloth dyed first with the less expensive indigo blue, then overlaid with red made from kermes dye.

While purple was worn less frequently by Medieval and Renaissance kings and princes, it was worn by the professors of many of Europe's new universities. Their robes were modeled after those of the clergy, and they often wore square/violet or purple/violet caps and robes, or black robes with purple/violet trim. Purple/violet robes were particularly worn by students of divinity.

Purple and/or violet also played an important part in the religious paintings of the Renaissance. Angels and the Virgin Mary were often portrayed wearing purple or violet robes.

File:Aquileia Basilica - Krypta Fresco Bischofsweihe Hermagoras.jpg, A 12th-century painting of Saint Peter consecrating Hermagoras, wearing purple, as a bishop.
File:Ghent Altarpiece D - Popes - Bishops.jpg, In the '' Ghent Altarpiece'' (1422) by Jan van Eyck, the popes and bishops are wearing purple robes.
File:Rafael - Ressurreição de Cristo (detalhe - anjo).jpg, A purple-clad angel from the ''Resurrection of Christ'' by Raphael (1483–1520)

18th and 19th centuries

In the 18th century, purple was still worn on occasion by Catherine the Great and other rulers, by bishops and, in lighter shades, by members of the aristocracy, but rarely by ordinary people, because of its high cost. But in the 19th century, that changed.

In 1856, an eighteen-year-old British chemistry student named William Henry Perkin was trying to make a synthetic quinine. His experiments produced instead the first synthetic aniline dye, a purple shade called mauveine, shortened simply to mauve. It took its name from the mallow flower, which is the same color. The new color quickly became fashionable, particularly after Queen Victoria wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862. Prior to Perkin's discovery, mauve was a color which only the aristocracy and rich could afford to wear. Perkin developed an industrial process, built a factory, and produced the dye by the ton, so almost anyone could wear mauve. It was the first of a series of modern industrial dyes which completely transformed both the chemical industry and fashion.

Purple was popular with the pre-Raphaelite painters in Britain, including Arthur Hughes, who loved bright colors and romantic scenes.

File:Rokotov ekaterina.jpg, Portrait of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, by Fyodor Rokotov. (State Hermitage Museum).
File:Arthur Hughes - April Love - Google Art Project.jpg, In England, pre-Raphaelite painters like Arthur Hughes were particularly enchanted by purple and/or violet. This is '' April Love'' (1856).
File:Gaston d’Orléans, comte d’Eu01.jpg, Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil (in dark purple dress) with her husband Prince Gaston and their son, the Prince of Grão-Pará at purple dusk (1877)
File:Uniform Albert I, Koning der Belgen.JPG, Order of Leopold founded in 1830.

20th and 21st centuries

At the turn of the century, purple was a favorite color of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, who flooded his pictures with sensual purples and violets.

In the 20th century, purple retained its historic connection with royalty; George VI (1896–1952), wore purple in his official portrait, and it was prominent in every feature of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, from the invitations to the stage design inside Westminster Abbey. But at the same time, it was becoming associated with social change; with the Women's Suffrage movement for the right to vote for women in the early decades of the century, with Feminism in the 1970s, and with the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s.

In the early 20th century, purple, green, and white were the colors of the Women's Suffrage movement, which fought to win the right to vote for women, finally succeeding with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Later, in the 1970s, in a tribute to the Suffragettes, it became the color of the women's liberation movement.

In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, prisoners who were members of non-conformist religious groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, were required to wear a purple triangle.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was also associated with counterculture, psychedelics, and musicians like Jimi Hendrix with his 1967 song "Purple Haze", or the English rock band of Deep Purple which formed in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, it was featured in the song and album '' Purple Rain'' (1984) by the American musician Prince.

The Purple Rain Protest was a protest against apartheid that took place in Cape Town, South Africa on 2 September 1989, in which a police water cannon with purple dye sprayed thousands of demonstrators. This led to the slogan ''The Purple Shall Govern''.

The violet or purple necktie became very popular at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, particularly among political and business leaders. It combined the assertiveness and confidence of a red necktie with the sense of peace and cooperation of a blue necktie, and it went well with the blue business suit worn by most national and corporate leaders.Eva Heller, Psychologie de la couleur: effets et symboliques.

File:Gustav Klimt 009.jpg, Gustav Klimt portrait of woman with a purple hat (1912).
File:George VI.jpg, George VI (1895–1952) wore purple in his official portrait.
File:Elizabeth and Philip 1953.jpg, The coronation portrait of Elizabeth II and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1953) has three different shades of purple in the train, curtains and crown.
File:Official Program Woman Suffrage Procession - March 3, 1913.jpg, Program from the Woman Suffrage Procession, a 1913 Women's Suffrage march.
File:The Childrens Museum of Indianapolis - Votes for women pennant.jpg, A pennant from the Women's Suffrage movement in the state of Indiana.
File:Feminism symbol.svg, Symbol of the Feminist movement in the United States (1970s). The purple color was chosen as a tribute to the Suffragette movement a half-century earlier.

In science and nature

Optics

The meanings of the color terms violet and purple varies even among native speakers of English, for example between United Kingdom and United States Since this Wikipedia page contains contributions from authors from different countries and different native languages, it is likely to be not consistent in the use of the color terms violet and purple.
According to some speakers/authors of English, purple, unlike violet, is not one of the colors of the visible spectrum. It was not one of the colors of the rainbow identified by Isaac Newton, although in earlier versions of Newton's work the word purple was used where violet was used in the final version. According to some authors, purple does not have its own wavelength of light. For this reason, it is sometimes called a ''non-spectral color''. It exists in culture and art, but not, in the same way that violet does, in optics. According to some speakers of English, purple is simply a combination, in various proportions, of two primary colors, red and blue. According to other speakers of English, the same range of colors is called violet.

In some textbooks of color theory, and depending on the geographical-cultural origin of the author, a "purple" is defined as any non-spectral color between violet and red (excluding violet and red themselves). The spectral colors violet and indigo would in that case not be purples. For other speakers of English, these colors are purples.

In the traditional color wheel long used by painters, purple is placed between crimson and violet. However, also here there is much variation in color terminology depending on cultural background of the painters and authors, and sometimes the term violet is used and placed in between red and blue on the traditional color wheel. In a slightly different variation, on the color wheel, purple is placed between magenta and violet. This shade is sometimes called electric purple (See shades of purple).

In the RGB color model, named for the colors red, green, and blue, used to create all the colors on a computer screen or television, the range of purples is created by mixing red and blue light of different intensities on a black screen. The standard HTML color purple is created by red and blue light of equal intensity, at a brightness that is halfway between full power and darkness.

In color printing, purple is sometimes represented by the color magenta, or sometimes by mixing magenta with red or blue. It can also be created by mixing just red and blue alone, but in that case the purple is less bright, with lower
saturation or intensity. A less bright purple can also be created with light or paint by adding a certain quantity of the third primary color (green for light or yellow for pigment).

On a chromaticity diagram, the straight line connecting the extreme spectral colors (red and violet) is known as the line of purples (or 'purple boundary'); it represents one limit of human color perception. The color magenta used in the CMYK printing process is near the center of the line of purples, but most people associate the term "purple" with a somewhat bluer tone, such as is displayed by the color "electric purple" (a color also directly on the line of purples), shown below.

On the CIE xy chromaticity diagram, violet is on the curved edge in the lower left, while purples are on the straight line connecting the extreme colors red and violet; this line is known as the line of purples, or the purple line.

File:RGB illumination.jpg, On a computer or television screen, purple colors are created by mixing red and blue light. This is called the RGB color model.
File:CIExy1931.png, The CIE xy chromaticity diagram

Pigments

*Hematite and manganese are the oldest pigments used for the color purple. They were used by Neolithic artists in the form of sticks, like charcoal, or ground and powdered and mixed with fat, and used as a paint. Hematite is a reddish iron oxide which, when ground coarsely, makes a purple pigment. One such pigment is caput mortuum, whose name is also used in reference to mummy brown. The latter is another pigment containing hematite and historically produced with the use of mummified corpses. Some of its compositions produce a purple color and may be called "mummy violet". Manganese was also used in Roman times to color glass purple.
*Han purple was the first synthetic purple pigment, invented in China in about 700 BC. It was used in wall paintings and pottery and other applications. In color, it was very close to indigo, which had a similar chemical structure. Han purple was very unstable, and sometimes was the result of the chemical breakdown of Han blue.

During the Middle Ages, artists usually made purple by combining red and blue pigments; most often blue azurite or lapis-lazuli with red ochre, cinnabar, or minium. They also combined lake colors made by mixing dye with powder; using woad or indigo dye for the blue, and dye made from cochineal for the red.

*Cobalt violet was the first modern synthetic color in the purple family, manufactured in 1859. It was found, along with cobalt blue, in the palette of Claude Monet, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. It was stable, but had low tinting power and was expensive, so quickly went out of use.
*Manganese violet was a stronger color than cobalt violet, and replaced it on the market.
*Quinacridone violet, one of a modern synthetic organic family of colors, was discovered in 1896 but not marketed until 1955. It is sold today under a number of brand names.

File:Lascaux painting.jpg, Manganese pigments were used in the neolithic paintings in the Lascaux cave, France.
File:Hematite.jpg, Hematite was often used as the red-purple color in the cave paintings of Neolithic artists.
File:Purpurite-120161.jpg, A sample of purpurite, or manganese phosphate, from the Packrat Mine in Southern California.
File:Cobaltviolet.jpg, A swatch of cobalt violet, popular among the French impressionists.
File:Manganese violet.jpg, Manganese violet is a synthetic pigment invented in the mid-19th century.
File:CI Pigment Violet 19 Beta.JPG, Quinacridone violet, a synthetic organic pigment sold under many different names.

Dyes

The most famous purple dye in the ancient world was Tyrian purple, made from a type of sea snail called the murex, found around the Mediterranean. (See history section above).

In western Polynesia, residents of the islands made a purple dye similar to Tyrian purple from the sea urchin. In Central America, the inhabitants made a dye from a different sea snail, the purpura, found on the coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The Mayans used this color to dye fabric for religious ceremonies, while the Aztecs used it for paintings of ideograms, where it symbolized royalty.Anne Carichon (2000), ''Couleurs: pigments et teintures dans les mains des peuples''. p. 133.

In the Middle Ages, those who worked with blue and black dyes belonged to separate guilds from those who worked with red and yellow dyes, and were often forbidden to dye any other colors than those of their own guild. Most purple fabric was made by the dyers who worked with red, and who used dye from madder or cochineal, so Medieval violet colors were inclined toward red.

Orcein, or ''purple moss'', was another common purple dye. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and was made from a Mediterranean lichen