50 Fun Facts About Purple

In the RGB colour model, purple is made by mixing which two colours of light?

Red and blue light mixed together give purple on a screen; purple has no single wavelength of its own, which is why it is called a non-spectral colour.

Which colour sits at the short-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, just before ultraviolet?

Purple, by contrast, is a mixture and never appears in a rainbow.

Who divided the visible spectrum into seven named colours in 1704?

Isaac Newton, in his 1704 Opticks, named seven spectral colours including indigo; he is said to have chosen seven to match the notes of the musical scale.

Tyrian purple, the dye of emperors, was extracted from what?

Predatory rock snails of the Muricidae family secrete it; the smell of the dye works was notorious.

Tyrian purple takes its name from a city in which ancient civilisation?

Phoenicia: Tyre, now in Lebanon, was the Phoenician city whose dye works gave the colour its name; the word Phoenicia itself may come from the Greek for purple-red.

Roughly how many murex molluscs were needed to yield 1.4 grams of pure Tyrian dye?

12,000 Murex brandaris snails yielded just 1.4 grams of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of one garment.

Unusually for an ancient dye, what happened to Tyrian purple when exposed to sunlight and weather?

It became brighter: unlike most ancient dyes, Tyrian purple intensified with weathering and sunlight rather than fading, and that colour-fastness was a big part of why it was prized.

By the fourth century AD, who was the only person in Rome permitted to wear Tyrian purple?

The emperor alone could wear it: sumptuary laws tightened steadily until, by the fourth century, Roman emperors reserved the dye for themselves and made wearing it treason.

What is the coloured compound in Tyrian purple?

6,6'-dibromoindigo, the pigment in Tyrian purple, is a close chemical cousin of indigo with two bromine atoms attached.

Which Roman author's Natural History describes extracting Tyrian purple from murex snails?

Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Book 9, describes how the dye was taken from the snail's gland and simmered in lead vats; he called the finest shade the colour of clotted blood.

The Byzantine title porphyrogennetos, 'purple-born', went to a ruler's child who was born when?

After the father took the throne: the title was reserved for children born to a reigning emperor, delivered in the Porphyra, a chamber of the Great Palace lined with purple porphyry stone.

Roman senators and senior magistrates were entitled to wear what purple detail on their togas?

A stripe: magistrates wore the toga praetexta with a purple border, and senators a broad purple stripe, the latus clavus; under the empire, full purple without permission could be punished as treason.

Which ruler was crowned emperor in 800 in Tyrian purple and buried in a purple shroud?

Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800 in a mantle of Tyrian purple; he died at Aachen in 814 and was buried in a purple Byzantine silk shroud that survives.

In 1464 Pope Paul II decreed cardinals should swap Tyrian purple for which colour?

The dye's supply had collapsed after Constantinople fell, and scarlet from kermes insects took its place.

Which culture developed the first synthetic purple pigment, around 700 BC?

China: Han purple, a barium copper silicate first made in the Zhou era, was used to paint the Terracotta Army; it is the earliest known synthetic purple pigment.

What was 18-year-old William Perkin trying to make in 1856 when he accidentally created the dye mauveine?

Quinine, the malaria drug, was his target; his professor August Hofmann had set the challenge, and instead the 18-year-old Perkin founded the synthetic dye industry with his aniline purple.

The name mauve comes from the French word for which flower?

Mallow: the French mauve names the mallow flower, whose petals match the dye's shade; Perkin's dye was sold as aniline purple before the name mauve caught on in 1859.

Which monarch made mauve fashionable with a mauveine-dyed silk gown at the 1862 Royal Exhibition?

The colour became so common that Punch magazine joked about an outbreak of mauve measles.

Who established the Badge of Military Merit, forerunner of the Purple Heart, in 1782?

George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit on 7 August 1782 at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters; only three awards are documented, and it lapsed after the Revolution.

The Purple Heart was revived in 1932 to mark what?

Washington's 200th birthday, 22 February 1932, was the occasion: the Army revived the badge as the Purple Heart by general order, with Washington's profile on the medal.

For what is the Purple Heart awarded?

About 1.5 million were manufactured in World War II, many in anticipation of an invasion of Japan that never came.

Purple, green and white were the colours of which early-20th-century movement?

Women's suffrage: the WSPU adopted purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope in 1908, and suffragettes wore the tricolour on sashes and badges.

In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners made to wear a purple triangle belonged to which group?

Jehovah's Witnesses, called Bibelforscher by the Nazis, wore the purple triangle for refusing military service and the Hitler salute; other groups were marked with red, black, pink and other colours.

Prince's Purple Rain spent how many consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200?

24 weeks, from August 1984 to January 1985, was its run atop the Billboard 200; the album also won the Oscar for Best Original Song Score.

Which Purple Rain track's lyrics helped prompt Tipper Gore to campaign for Parental Advisory stickers?

Darling Nikki's explicit opening lyric shocked Tipper Gore when she heard her 11-year-old daughter playing it; the PMRC's 'Filthy Fifteen' list put the song at number one.

Which Prince single from Purple Rain was his first Billboard Hot 100 number one?

When Doves Cry topped the Hot 100 for five weeks in summer 1984, Prince's first number one; famously the track has no bass line.

Jimi Hendrix said the title of Purple Haze came from what?

A dream of walking under the sea, Hendrix said, inspired the title; the 1967 single reached number three in the UK, and in concert he sometimes sang 'kiss this guy' as a joke.

What was sprayed on anti-apartheid protesters in Cape Town on 2 September 1989?

Purple dye from a police water cannon drenched the marchers; a protester turned the cannon on National Party headquarters, and graffiti soon declared 'The purple shall govern'.

Amethyst is a purple-hued variety of which mineral?

Quartz: amethyst is silicon dioxide whose iron impurities, irradiated naturally in the rock, produce the violet colour.

The name amethyst comes from Greek words meaning what?

Not intoxicated: Greek amethystos joins a- ('not') to methyo ('I am drunk'); the ancients believed the stone warded off drunkenness and drank from amethyst cups.

Amethyst is the birthstone for which month?

February's birthstone is amethyst; it ranked among the cardinal gems with diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald until huge Brazilian deposits found in the 19th century crashed its price.

Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple won which award in 1983, making her the first Black woman to do so?

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to The Color Purple in 1983, the first awarded to a Black woman; the 1985 Spielberg film was nominated for eleven Oscars and won none.

Who plays Celie in the 1985 film of The Color Purple?

Whoopi Goldberg played Celie in her first major film role, earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination; Oprah Winfrey played Sofia.

The term 'purple prose' traces back to which Roman poet's Ars Poetica?

Horace, in his Ars Poetica, mocked writers who tacked on gleaming 'purple patches' (purpureus pannus) that did not fit the rest of the work.

What does the 'purple' in Zijincheng, Beijing's Purple Forbidden City, refer to?

The North Star: Zijincheng borrows 'zi' from Ziwei, the purple enclosure of stars around the pole star where the celestial emperor was believed to dwell; the palace itself is red-walled and yellow-roofed.

Which British chocolate maker's famous purple wrapper is registered as Pantone 2685C?

Cadbury's Dairy Milk wrapper is Pantone 2685C; the company spent years in UK courts with Nestlé over whether the shade could be trademarked for chocolate.

Dutch growers bred the orange form of which root vegetable from purple and yellow varieties?

Carrot: the earliest cultivated carrots, from 10th-century Persia and Afghanistan, were purple and yellow; Dutch growers developed the sweet orange carrot in the 17th century.

What natural pigments make grapes, eggplants and pansies appear purple?

Anthocyanins, water-soluble flavonoid pigments, colour grapes, eggplants and pansies; they shift from red in acid to blue in alkaline conditions and shield leaves from harsh light.

Barney, the purple star of PBS's Barney & Friends, is what kind of dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus rex: Barney is a six-foot purple T. rex with a green belly who first appeared in the 1988 home-video series Barney & the Backyard Gang.

When McDonald's Grimace debuted in 1971, what was the 'Evil Grimace' known for stealing?

Milkshakes: the four-armed 'Evil Grimace' of 1971 snatched them from customers; he was soon softened into the friendly purple blob.

Who created the purple Marvel villain Thanos, who first appeared in Iron Man #55 in 1973?

Jim Starlin created Thanos while a psychology student, naming him after Thanatos, the Greek personification of death; Josh Brolin played him in the films from Guardians of the Galaxy onward.

Which element takes its name from the Greek for 'violet-coloured', after its purple vapour?

Iodine comes from the Greek ioeides, 'violet-coloured', because the solid sublimes into a purple vapour; Bernard Courtois discovered it in seaweed ash in 1811.

The Purple People Eaters were the celebrated defensive line of which NFL team?

The Minnesota Vikings' line of Alan Page, Carl Eller, Jim Marshall and Gary Larsen earned the name in the late 1960s, playing under the motto 'Meet at the quarterback'.

In US politics, a place described as 'purple' is what?

A swing state, where neither party dominates, mixes Republican red and Democratic blue; the red/blue convention itself only became fixed in the media after the drawn-out 2000 election.

In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, purple-hued vestments are worn during which two seasons?

Advent and Lent, the two penitential seasons, call for violet vestments; rose replaces it on Gaudete and Laetare Sundays as a small break in the penitence.

Imperial porphyry, the purple stone used for Roman emperors' sarcophagi, was quarried in which country?

The single quarry at Mons Porphyrites in the Eastern Desert supplied every red porphyry column in Rome.

The Lavender Scare of the 1950s was a US government campaign against whom?

Homosexuals: the Lavender Scare, running alongside McCarthyism, treated gay employees as security risks; Eisenhower's 1953 Executive Order 10450 cemented it and thousands of federal workers lost their jobs.

Gelett Burgess's nonsense poem Purple Cow first appeared in 1895 in which magazine?

The Lark, the San Francisco little magazine Burgess co-founded, printed Purple Cow in its first issue in 1895; two years later he published a follow-up regretting he ever wrote it.

A gram of Tyrian purple made by the original method cost roughly how much in the year 2000?

2,000 euros bought a single gram in 2000, made by the ancient recipe from some 10,000 molluscs; chemical synthesis of the same dibromoindigo is far cheaper.

Cobalt violet, the first modern synthetic purple pigment, was manufactured in which year?

1859: cobalt violet, a cobalt phosphate, was first made that year; Monet, Signac and Seurat used it, but it was expensive with weak tinting power, so manganese violet soon replaced it.