__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 litt ...

(cobalt glass) used in laundering and

dye Juan de Guillebon, better known by his stage name DyE, is a French musician. He is known for the music video of the single "Fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical ele ...

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 color model, RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB color model, RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between Violet (color), violet and cyan on the optical spe ...

hue, 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. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

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 com ...

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 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 ''< ...

defines ''powderblue'' as a pale

cyan Cyan () is the color between blue and green on the visible spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a predominant wavelength between 500 and 520 nm, between the wavelengths of green and blue. In the subtractive color system, or CMYK c ...

shade, RGB(176,224,230). This is the colour displayed by a web browser if "color=powderblue" is specified in CSS. However the use of such colour names in stylesheets is deprecated, with the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

standards body itself saying, "it is often hard to imagine what each name will look like".W3C TR CSS4 Color Module, Named Colors
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Crayola colour

Displayed adjacent 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