49 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?

Violet has the shortest wavelengths the eye can see, so a prism or a raindrop bends it the most, which is why it runs along the inner edge of a rainbow.

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

Isaac Newton, in his 1704 Opticks, named seven spectral colours; 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?

Sea snails of the murex family were heaped in vats and left to rot before the dye could be drawn off, and ancient writers complained about the stench of the works.

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.

Plutarch describes which queen arriving at Tarsus in a gilded barge with purple sails and silver oars?

Cleopatra staged the entrance in 41 BC to dazzle Mark Antony, reclining under a gold canopy dressed as Venus; the crowd ran to the river and left him sitting alone in the marketplace.

What did Tyrian purple do in sunlight and weather that set it apart from other ancient dyes?

It kept its colour: where most ancient dyes faded, Tyrian purple held fast for generations, a big part of why buyers paid so much for it.

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which turtle wears a purple mask and fights with a wooden staff?

Donatello is the team's inventor; the colour-coded masks only arrived with the 1987 cartoon, which also gave the turtles their catchphrases and their love of pizza.

Which Roman author's Natural History describes how Tyrian purple was made?

Pliny the Elder's Natural History has the dye steeped for three days and then slowly boiled down; he judged the finest Tyrian shade to be 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, crowned emperor in Rome in 800, is linked to a purple Byzantine silk burial shroud that still survives?

Charlemagne died at Aachen in 814; in 1165 Frederick Barbarossa had him declared a saint, but by an antipope, so Rome never recognised it.

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?

China: Han purple, a barium copper silicate, coloured the Terracotta Army; one theory is that Taoist alchemists hit on it while making glass meant to look like jade.

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 fuelled 'mauve mania' by wearing the colour to her eldest daughter's wedding in 1858?

Queen Victoria wore mauve velvet to the Princess Royal's wedding, and the craze spread so fast that Punch joked the 'mauve measles' were getting out of hand.

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.

Which general, then Army chief of staff, revived the Purple Heart in 1932?

Douglas MacArthur quietly reopened work on the design and issued it on the 200th birthday of the man who created its forerunner; the first Purple Heart went to MacArthur himself.

For what is the Purple Heart awarded?

Being wounded or killed in service earns it; so many were struck for an invasion of Japan that never came that the stockpile was still being handed out half a century later.

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

Women's suffrage: the WSPU chose purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope, 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 album Purple Rain is the soundtrack to a 1984 film set in which city, his home town?

Minneapolis: the film centres on the city's First Avenue club, where the title song's basic track had been recorded live at a benefit concert in August 1983.

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 gave Hendrix the title, he said; he had also been reading a science-fiction novel in which sunspots cast a 'purplish haze' over a distant planet.

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 deposits found in Brazil 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.

Which root vegetable was mostly purple or yellow until Dutch growers popularised today's familiar colour?

Carrot: the first cultivated carrots, grown in Central Asia about a thousand years ago, were purple or yellow; the tale that the Dutch bred orange ones to honour William of Orange is doubted by historians.

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: Sheryl Leach dreamed up the gentle purple T. rex after finding no videos that could hold her young son's attention, and launched him on home video in 1988.

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, blends the two parties' map colours; that colour code 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?

Egypt: every block came from one quarry, Mons Porphyrites in the Eastern Desert, whose location was then lost for centuries until two English Egyptologists found it again in 1823.

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 1895 nonsense rhyme begins 'I never saw a purple' what?

Cow: the four-line rhyme, first printed in his San Francisco magazine The Lark, was quoted at him so often that Burgess wrote a sequel threatening to kill anyone who repeated it.

In an ancient legend, which hero's dog discovered purple dye when something it bit stained its mouth?

Heracles, in the version told by Julius Pollux: the nymph he was courting saw the dog's stained muzzle and wanted a robe of the same colour, a scene Rubens later painted.

Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' describes a casino fire in which Swiss lakeside town?

Montreux: the casino burned down during a Frank Zappa concert in December 1971 after someone fired a flare gun, and the band, in town to record, watched the smoke roll over the lake.