“Doppelgänger stories continued to multiply.”

Verdigris was such a beautiful color, it was hard for painters to resist, even when they knew it would render their works mortal.

I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood.

A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night.

The moon is a woman. Her her-ness is right there in the word, full of round letters, soft as breasts and wombs. It sounds like a mother cooing to her baby.

Mustard yellow is the 2019 color trend that won’t go away—but its roots are as old as the earth itself.

Once you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches.

Since 2016, over half of the Great Barrier Reef has died. Katy Kelleher on what it means for Pantone to name Living Coral the color of 2019.

In the first installment of Hue’s Hue, Katy Kelleher presages a boom in eau de Nil, the slippery color that snakes through Egypt.

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir.

A brief history of the color orange

Ugly fashion is a mirror; it reveals the repulsive nature of our consumerist desires. All ugly fashion is political, but also, all fashion is ugly if you look at it through a politicized lens.

A Tale of Two Hookers (and One Green)

This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. You can read the first installment, on ugly art, here.     I covet a piece of technology that never existed and likely never will. I can’t stop thinking about it. I cove…

  Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing dr…

  Inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, below a vast glass roof and above a neoclassical series of gray stone columns, hangs a fake painting. It’s a Mark Rothko—or, rather, a replica of a Rothko. The canvas is covered in m…

  In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The buildi…

  According to folklore, one of the nineteen riddles the queen of Sheba posed to Solomon had to do with flowers. The queen brought garlands of cloth flowers or bouquets of wax blossoms—stories differ—and asked Solomon to pick the true flower h…

  Here are two yellow fables: In the first story, a man sits next to a pool of water. It gleams silver in the moonlight, and the surface is untroubled by leaves or raindrops. He can see his own reflection, and he admires the tender sweep of his…

  When looking up the word incarnadine in Merriam Webster I found some truly discomforting writing. After a brief definition of the word (“having the pinkish color of flesh” or “blood red”), there appears a drop-down box with an editor’s note. “Ca…

  In a strip mall, next to a CVS Pharmacy, and tucked behind a Burger King, I learned about my angel. While I waited for a prescription to be filled, I wandered into the only New Age store in this small northeastern city. A woman with long gray ha…

  In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like fo…