Orange (color)

Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. In traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, produced by mixing yellow and red. In the RGB colour model, it is a tertiary colour. It is named after the fruit of the same name.

The orange colour of many fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and oranges, comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the Sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth. Similarly, the hues of autumn leaves are from the same pigment after chlorophyll is removed.

In Europe and America, surveys show that orange is the colour most associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroversion, warmth, fire, energy, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the autumn and Allhallowtide seasons, as well as having long been the national colour of the Netherlands and the House of Orange. It also serves as the political colour of the Christian democracy political ideology and most Christian democratic political parties. In Asia, it is an important symbolic colour in Buddhism and Hinduism.

In nature and culture

File:Ambersweet oranges.jpg, The colour orange derives its name from the orange fruit.
File:Delicatearch.png, Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah.
File:Lifeboats at Arklow Harbour - geograph.org.uk - 1453984.jpg, Lifeboats in Arklow Harbour, Ireland. Orange is chosen for lifeboats and lifesaving jackets because of its high visibility.
File:LaoWalkingMonk.jpg, A young Buddhist monk in Laos.
File:(A) Sadhu India.jpg, Hindu Sadhus, or holy men, in Rajasthan, wear orange as a sacred colour.
File:Saffron Crop.JPG, Saffron is both a spice and a widely used dye in Asia.

Etymology

In English, the colour orange is named after the appearance of the ripe orange fruit. The word comes from the , from the old term for the fruit, . The French word, in turn, comes from the Italian , based on Arabic (), borrowed from Persian derived from Sanskrit (), which in turn derives from a Dravidian root word (compare / ''/'' which refers to bitter orange in Tamil and Malayalam). The earliest known recorded use of ''orange'' as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor. Another early recorded use was in 1512, in a will now filed with the Public Record Office. The place-name " Orange" has a separate etymology and is not related to that of the colour.

Before this word was introduced to the English-speaking world, ''saffron'' already existed in the English language. ''Crog'' also referred to the saffron colour, so that orange was also referred to as (''yellow-red'') for reddish orange, or (''yellow-saffron'') for yellowish orange. Alternatively, orange things were sometimes described as red such as red deer, red hair, the Red Planet and robin redbreast.

History and art

In ancient Egypt, and ancient India, artists used an orange colour on some of their items. In Egypt, a mineral pigment called realgar was used for tomb paintings, as well as for other purposes. Orange carnelians were significantly used during Indus Valley civilization which was, in turn, obtained the people from Kutch, Gujarat. The colour was also used later by Medieval artists for the colouring of manuscripts. Pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment. Orpiment was an important item of trade in the Roman Empire and was used as a medicine in China although it contains arsenic and is highly toxic. It was also used as a fly poison and to poison arrows. Because of its yellow-orange colour, it was also a favourite with alchemists who were searching for a way to make gold, both in China and in the West.

Before the late 15th century, the colour orange existed in Europe, but without the name; it was simply called yellow-red. Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century, along with the Sanskrit , which gradually became part of several European languages: in Spanish, in Portuguese, and orange in English.

File:Egypt lyre 001.jpg, People in ancient Egyptian wall paintings often were shown with orange or yellow-orange skin, painted with a pigment called realgar.
File:Orpiment-d06-185b.jpg, The mineral orpiment was a source of yellow and orange pigments in ancient Rome, though it contained arsenic and was highly toxic.
File:Vladimirskaya ikona.jpg, Icon, 12th century

House of Orange

The House of Orange-Nassau was one of the most influential royal houses in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. It originated in 1163 the tiny Principality of Orange, a feudal state of north of Avignon in southern France. The Principality of Orange took its name not from the fruit, but from a Roman-Celtic settlement on the site which was founded in 36 or 35 BC and was named Arausio, after a Celtic water god; however, the name may have been slightly altered, and the town associated with the colour, because it was on the route by which quantities of oranges were brought from southern ports such as Marseille to northern France.

The family of the Prince of Orange eventually adopted the name and the colour orange in the 1570s. The colour came to be associated with Protestantism, due to participation by the House of Orange on the Protestant side in the French Wars of Religion. One member of the house, William I of Orange, organised the Dutch resistance against Spain, a war that lasted eighty years, until the Netherlands won its independence. The House's arguably most prominent member, William III of Orange, became King of England in 1689, after the downfall of the Catholic James II in the Glorious Revolution.

Due to William III, orange became an important political colour in Britain and Europe. William was a Protestant, and as such, he defended the Protestant minority of Ireland against the majority Roman Catholic population. As a result, the Protestants of Ireland were known as Orangemen. Orange eventually became one of the colours of the Irish flag, symbolising the Protestant heritage. His rebel flag became the forerunner of The Netherlands' modern flag.

When the Dutch settlers living in the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) migrated into the Southern African heartlands in the 19th century, they founded what they called the Orange Free State. In the United States, the flag of the City of New York has an orange stripe, to remember the Dutch colonists who founded the city. William of Orange is also remembered as the founder of the College of William & Mary, and Nassau County in New York is named after the House of Orange-Nassau.

File:King William III of England, (1650-1702).jpg, William III of Orange, ruler of both England and the Netherlands
File:Flag of the Orange Free State.svg, The Orange Free State in South Africa was an independent Boer republic in the late 19th century, then a British colony, then part of the Union of South Africa. The orange colour came from the Orange River, named for the Dutch House of Orange. The Dutch flag is in the canton.
File:Flag of South Africa 1928-1994.svg, The flag of South Africa (1928–1994) had an orange stripe, due to the influence of House of Orange and the period when there was a Dutch colony.
File:Flag of New York City.svg, The modern flag of New York City takes its colours from the Dutch flag of the 17th century, and has an orange stripe in honour of the House of Orange-Nassau.
File:Queensday 2011 Amsterdam 12.jpg, Celebrating Queensday in Amsterdam. The royal family of the Netherlands belong to the House of Orange.

18th and 19th century

In the 18th century, orange was sometimes used to depict the robes of Pomona, the goddess of fruitful abundance; her name came from the , the Latin word for fruit. Oranges themselves became more common in northern Europe, thanks to the 17th-century invention of the heated greenhouse, a building type which became known as an orangerie. The French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard depicted an allegorical figure of "inspiration" dressed in orange.

In 1797 a French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, or lead chromate, which led in 1809 to the invention of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments, cobalt red, cobalt yellow, and cobalt orange, the last made from cadmium sulfide plus cadmium selenide, soon followed. These new pigments, plus the invention of the metal paint tube in 1841, made it possible for artists to paint outdoors and to capture the colours of natural light.

In Britain orange became highly popular with the Pre-Raphaelites and with history painters. The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, a prolific model and the wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Lord Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy, produced '' Flaming June'', a painting of a sleeping young woman in a bright orange dress, which won wide acclaim. Albert Joseph Moore painted festive scenes of Romans wearing orange cloaks brighter than any the Romans ever likely wore. In the United States, Winslow Homer brightened his palette with vivid oranges.

In France, painters took orange in an entirely different direction. In 1872 Claude Monet painted '' Impression, Sunrise'', a tiny orange sun and some orange light reflected on the clouds and water in the centre of a hazy blue landscape. This painting gave its name to the impressionist movement.

Orange became an important colour for all the impressionist painters. They all had studied the recent books on colour theory, and they know that orange placed next to azure blue made both colours much brighter. Auguste Renoir painted boats with stripes of chrome orange paint straight from the tube. Paul Cézanne did not use orange pigment, but produced his own oranges with touches of yellow, red and ochre against a blue background. Toulouse-Lautrec often used oranges in the skirts of dancers and gowns of Parisiennes in the cafes and clubs he portrayed. For him, it was the colour of festivity and amusement.

The post-impressionists went even further with orange. Paul Gauguin used oranges as backgrounds, for clothing and skin colour, to fill his pictures with light and exoticism. But no other painter used orange so often and dramatically as Vincent van Gogh. who had shared a house with Gauguin in Arles for a time. For Van Gogh orange and yellow were the pure sunlight of Provence. He produced his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red, and placed them next to slashes of sienna red and bottle green, and below a sky of turbulent blue and violet. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt blue sky. He wrote to his brother Theo of "searching for oppositions of blue with orange, of red with green, of yellow with violet, searching for broken colours and neutral colours to harmonize the brutality of extremes, trying to make the colours intense, and not a harmony of greys."

File:Jean-Honoré Fragonard - Inspiration.jpg, ''Inspiration'', by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1789)
File:Moore Albert Midsummer.jpg, ''Midsummer'', by Albert Joseph Moore (1848–1893)
File:Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Regina Cordium (1860).jpg, The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, model and wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement (1860).
File:Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant.jpg, '' Impression, Sunrise'' by Claude Monet (1872) featured a tiny but vivid chrome orange Sun. The painting gave its name to the Impressionist movement.
File:Pedro Américo - D. Pedro II na abertura da Assembléia Geral (cropped).jpg, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil wearing the imperial mantle decorated with orange feathers. Detail from a painting by Pedro Américo (1872)
File:1877-winslow-homer-the-new-novel.jpg, ''The new novel'', by Winslow Homer (1877)
File:Chatou hires.jpg, ''Oarsmen at Chatou'' by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1879). Renoir knew that orange and blue brightened each other when put side by side.
File:Paul Gauguin 112.jpg, ''Self-portrait'' of Paul Gauguin (1888)
File:Van Gogh - Weiden bei Sonnenuntergang.jpeg, ''Willow trees at sunset'' by Van Gogh, Arles (1888)
File:VanGogh-starry night ballance1.jpg, '' The Starry Night'' by Vincent van Gogh, features orange stars, an orange Venus, and an orange Moon (1889)
File:Monet grainstacks W1273.jpg, ''Meules'', from the 1890–1891 series of '' Haystacks'' by Claude Monet
File:Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 031.jpg, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was extremely fond of orange, the colour of amusement '' Jane Avril'' (1893–1896).
File:Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896).jpg, '' Flaming June'', by Lord Leighton (1895)
File:Paul Gauguin 135.jpg, '' Vairumati'', by Paul Gauguin (1897)

20th and 21st centuries

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the colour orange had highly varied associations, both positive and negative.

The high visibility of orange made it a popular colour for certain kinds of clothing and equipment. During the Second World War, US Navy pilots in the Pacific began to wear orange inflatable life jackets, which could be spotted by search and rescue planes. After the war, these jackets became common on both civilian and naval vessels of all sizes, and on aircraft flown over water. Orange is also widely worn (to avoid being hit) by workers on highways and by cyclists.

A herbicide called Agent Orange was widely sprayed from aircraft by the Royal Air Force during the Malayan Emergency and the US Air Force during the Vietnam War to remove the forest and jungle cover beneath which enemy combatants were believed to be hiding, and to expose their supply routes. The chemical was not actually orange, but took its name from the colour of the steel drums in which it was stored. Agent Orange was toxic, and was later linked to birth defects and other health problems.

File:John Thach.jpg, A US Navy pilot during World War II wearing an orange inflatable life jacket.
File:ISS Expedition 5 crew.jpg, Crew members of the International Space Station.
File:US-Huey-helicopter-spraying-Agent-Orange-in-Vietnam.jpg, A US helicopter spraying Agent Orange on a jungle during the Vietnam War,
File:MOWAG Feuerwehrvan.JPG, Firefighter car in Switzerland
File:Eesti mailbox.JPG, Orange mailbox, Estonia

Orange also had and continues to have a political dimension. Orange serves as the colour of Christian democratic political ideology, which is based on Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinist theology; Christian democratic political parties came to prominence in Europe and the Americas after World War II.

File:Fidesz 2015.svg, Logo of the Fidesz
File:Logo of the Christian Democratic and Flemish (2022).svg, Logo of the Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams
File:Logo-CVP.svg, Logo of the Christian Democratic People's Party of Switzerland
File:Logo unio 2015.png, Logo of the Democratic Union of Catalonia
File:People's National Party (Jamaica) logo.png, The logo of the People's National Party of Jamaica

In Ukraine in November–December 2004, it became the colour of the Orange Revolution, a popular movement which carried activist and reformer Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency. In parts of the world, especially Northern Ireland, the colour is associated with the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organisation and relatedly, Orangemen, marches and other social and political activities, with the colour orange being associated with Protestantism similar to the Netherlands.

File:Flag of the Orange Order.svg, Flag of the Orange Order, an international Protestant fraternal organisation
File:Stamp of Ukraine s635.jpg, A 2005 postage stamp of Ukraine commemorated the Orange Revolution of 2004.

Science

Optics

In optics, orange is the colour seen by the eye when looking at light with a wavelength between approximately 585–620 nm. It has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space.

In the traditional colour wheel used by painters, orange is the range of colours between red and yellow, and painters can obtain orange simply by mixing red and yellow in various proportions; however these colours are never as vivid as a pure orange pigment. In the RGB colour model (the system used to display colours on a television or computer screen), orange is generated by combining high intensity red light with a lower intensity green light, with the blue light turned off entirely. Orange is a tertiary colour which is numerically halfway between gamma-compressed red and yellow, as can be seen in the RGB colour wheel.

Regarding painting, blue is the complementary colour to orange. As many painters of the 19th century discovered, blue and orange reinforce each other. The painter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that in his paintings, he was trying to reveal "the oppositions of blue with orange, of red with green, of yellow with violet... trying to make the colours intense and not a harmony of grey". In another letter he wrote simply, "there is no orange without blue." Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and many other impressionist and post-impressionist painters frequently placed orange against azure or cobalt blue, to make both colours appear brighter.

The actual complement of orange is azure – a colour that is one quarter of the way between blue and green on the colour spectrum. The actual complementary colour of true blue is yellow. Orange pigments are largely in the ochre or cadmium families, and absorb mostly greenish-blue light.

(See also shades of orange).

Pigments and dyes

File:Orpiment mineral.jpg, A sample of orpiment from an arsenic mine in southern Russia. Orpiment has been used to make orange pigment since ancient times in ancient Egypt, Europe and China. Romans used the mineral for trade.
File:Realgar09.jpg, Realgar, an arsenic sulfide mineral 1.5-2.5 Mohs hardness, is highly toxic. It was used since ancient times until the 19th century to make red-orange pigment, as a poison, and a medicine.
File:Crocoite from the Dundas extended mine, Dundas, Tasmania, Australia.jpg, A sample of crocoite crystals from Dundas extended mine in Tasmania. Discovered in 1797 by the French chemist Louis Vauquelin, it was used to make the first synthetic orange pigment, chrome orange, used by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other painters.
File:Safran-Weinviertel Niederreiter 2 Gramm 8285.jpg, Saffron, made from the hand-picked stigmas of the ''Crocus sativus'' flower, is used both as a dye and as a spice.
File:Curcuma longa (Haldi) W IMG 2440.jpg, The Curcuma longa plant is used to make turmeric, a common and less expensive substitute for saffron as a dye and colour.
File:Curcuma longa roots.jpg, Turmeric powder, first used as a dye, and later as a medicine and spice in South Asian cuisine.

Other orange pigments include:
*Minium and massicot are bright yellow and orange pigments made since ancient times by heating lead oxide and its variants. Minium was used in the Byzantine Empire for making the red-orange colour on illuminated manuscripts, while massicot was used by ancient Egyptian scribes and in the Middle Ages. Both substances are toxic, and were replaced in the beginning of the 20th century by chrome orange and cadmium orange.
*Cadmium orange is a synthetic pigment made from cadmium sulfide. It is a by-product of mining for zinc, but also occurs rarely in nature in the mineral greenockite. It is usually made by replacing some of the sulphur with selenium, which results in an expensive but deep and lasting colour. Selenium was discovered in 1817, but the pigment was not made commercially until 1910.
*Quinacridone orange is a synthetic organic pigment first identified in 1896 and manufactured in 1935. It makes a vivid and solid orange.
* Diketopyrrolopyrrole orange or DPP orange is a synthetic organic pigment first commercialised in 1986. It is sold under various commercial names, such as translucent orange. It makes an extremely bright and lasting orange, and is widely used to colour plastics and fibres, as well as in paints.

Orange natural objects

The orange colour of carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, oranges, and many other fruits and vegetables comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth. The carotenes themselves take their name from the carrot. Autumn leaves also get their orange colour from carotenes. When the weather turns cold and production of green chlorophyll stops, the orange colour remains.

Before the 18th century, carrots from Asia were usually purple, while those in Europe were either white or red. Dutch farmers bred a variety that was orange; according to some sources, as a tribute to the stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, William of Orange. The long orange Dutch carrot, first described in 1721, is the ancestor of the orange horn carrot, one of the most common types found in supermarkets today. It takes its name from the town of Hoorn, in the Netherlands.

File:CarrotDiversityLg.jpg, Carrots, pumpkins and other vegetables get their orange colour from carotenes, a variety of photosynthetic pigment, which takes its own name from the carrot.
File:Japanese maple.jpg, A Japanese maple tree in autumn. Autumn leaves also get their orange colour from carotenes.
File:Traugers-farm-bucks-county-large.jpg, Pumpkins
File:CarrotRoots.jpg, Carrots
File:5aday sweet potato.jpg, Sweet potatoes

Flowers

Orange is traditionally associated with the autumn season, with the harvest and autumn leaves. The flowers, like orange fruits and vegetables and autumn leaves, get their colour from the photosynthetic pigments called carotenes.

File:California Poppies1.jpg, A field of California poppies
File:Calendula officinalis 0.0 R.jpg, The marigold flower, or ''Calendula''
File:- Flower 19 -.jpg, Poppy flower
File:Daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) v2.jpg, Daylily (''Hemerocallis fulva'')
File:Begonia 'On Top Sunset Shades' 01.JPG, Begonia cultivar
File:Sylvia Ball-Dahlie.JPG, The dahlia
File:Orange Rose1.jpg, An orange rose
File:Orange hibiscus.jpg, alt=Orange hibiscus, Orange hibiscus
File:Butterfly Weed Asclepias tuberosa Buds.jpg, buds of the butterfly weed, or ''Asclepias tuberosa''
File:Hieracium aurantiacum LC0106.jpg, '' Hieracium aurantiacum'', or orange hawkweed
File:Heliconia psittacorum 01.JPG, ''Heliconia psittacorum'', or parrot's flower, is a perennial herb native to the Caribbean and northern South America.
File:Fritillaria imperialis 01.JPG, ''Fritillaria imperialis''
File:Yellow French Marigold Flower.jpg, '' Tagetes erecta'' (marigold)
File:Vanda garayi.png, ''Vanda garayi''

Animals

File:Canario paxaro.jpg, Canary bird
File:Panthera tigris tigris.jpg, A Bengal tiger (''Panthera tigris tigris'')
File:Red Squirrel - Lazienki.JPG, A red squirrel is actually orange.
File:Vulpes vulpes laying in snow.jpg, A red fox, or ''Vulpes vulpes'', in the snow.
File:Iguana iguana (orange male).jpg, An iguana
File:A couple of Tadorna ferruginea.2.jpg, The '' Tadorna ferruginea'', or ruddy shelduck, lives in Southeast Europe, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, and migrates in the winter to India.
File:Flamingo National Zoo.jpg, An orange flamingo in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
File:Altamira Oriole icterus gularis, Bentsen State Park TX.jpg, An Altamira oriole in Bentsen State Park, Texas.
File:Flame angelfish (Centropyge loricula).jpg, A flame angelfish, or ''Centropyge loricula''
File:Auftauchender Koi 2011.JPG, A koi, a domesticated carp bred in Japan for its ornamental value in gardens and ponds
File:Arion rufus (Dourbes).jpg, An ''Arion rufus

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