The stories behind colours: where they came from, who made them, and what they have meant. Every story is referenced, and the sources are listed at its foot.
9 stories
Cheddar is a pale creamy yellow. Every orange block in the chiller has been dyed.
Red on the first day, purple by the third, then green and yellow. The sequence is familiar, and it will not tell you when a bruise was inflicted.
A few minutes spent looking at two coloured patterns can leave your colour vision altered for weeks.
Two fabrics match perfectly under the shop lights and stop matching in the car park.
The best-known photograph of Neptune shows a deep azure planet, and the caption NASA released with it said the colour was not accurate.
The clip on a finger reads a colour, and it reads that colour less accurately through darker skin.
Researchers drained the colour out of most of what people were looking at, and a large share of them never noticed.
There is a blue as dark as black that is also unmistakably blue, and it takes about half a minute to see it.
In a flash photograph most pupils come back red. Occasionally one comes back white, and that is a reason to have the eye looked at.
No story matches that.