https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/601/post_images/Slide107.JPG">

Or, as one wit on the web, Steven Markow, said of that year’s Pantone “colors of the year,” now we have 15–3919, “Serenity – you will quickly achieve nirvana surrounded by this utterly forgettable light blue,” and 16–1109, “Greige – no way, you’re telling me grey and beige had a kid together? Is it as totally fucking boring as its parents?”¹⁹³

And then there is the conversation on Reddit where the Color Marketing Managers at PPG Architectural coatings talk about the 500 new names they have added to the 7,700 paint colors in their repertoire including “Black Flame” and “Millennial Pink.” To which commenters suggested the addition of others, like “Accidental Brown” and “Spotless Mind.”¹⁹⁴

Meanwhile, the range of colors is by no means limited to the gamut of CMYK or RGB recomposition. While researching new materials that could be used in electronic circuitry, Oregon State University materials scientist Mas Subramanian and his students accidentally discovered a new blue, by combining the elements yttrium, indium, manganese, and oxygen.¹⁹⁵ With the seriousness you would expect of chemists, they called this YInMin Blue, after its elements. Now it’s the color of a Crayola crayon.

Artist Anish Kapoor created a furore in the art world when he purchased exclusive rights to that blackest black, “Vantablack,” created by Nanosystems, an English nanotechnology company that had been working on coatings for military uses, including stealth bombers. Made of carbon nanotubes, Vantablack absorbs 99.96 percent of the light that reaches its surface.¹⁹⁶

When another artist, Stuart Semple, created what he thought might be the world’s pinkest pink, he made it available in 50 g bottles for £3.99 through his webstore – to everyone except Anish Kapoor, @anishKapoor #ShareTheBlack.

---

¹⁹² Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker, 2011, Pantone: The 20th Century in Color, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, p. 125.

¹⁹³ https://medium.com/slackjaw/pantone-color-names-v-what-they-actually-look-like-3361033af61a#.1cyzyny6p

¹⁹⁴ www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3tyt69/we_create_the_names_of_paint_colors_for_a_living/

¹⁹⁵ Gabriel Rosenberg, 2016, “A Chemist Accidentally Creates a New Blue. Then What?,” in National Public Radio www.npr.org/2016/07/16/485696248/a-chemist-accidentally-creates-a-new-blue-then-what?t=1560853665108

¹⁹⁶ Henri Neuendorf, 2016, “Anish Kapoor Angers Artists by Seizing Exclusive Rights to ‘Blackest Black’ Pigment,” Artnet News, 29 February.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149-151. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

The Colors “Greige” and “YInMin Blue” §MS1.3.1f