Culture

Elephant's Breath, Dead Salmon and the business of naming paint

Hand-painted plate of grey colour swatches with names and examples, from Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, 1821

The library at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, with bookcases and a decorated ceiling

Hand-painted plate of purple colour swatches with names, from Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, 1821

Watercolour of HMS Beagle at sea by Conrad Martens

Watercolour portrait of the young Charles Darwin by George Richmond

Farrow & Ball sells greys and pinks under names that tell you almost nothing about the colour. The history of colour naming, and some research on how names change what we see and taste, suggests why that works.

A grey called Elephant's Breath

Farrow & Ball, the Dorset paint company, sells a grey called Elephant's Breath, a pink called Dead Salmon, a brown called Mouse's Back and a darker grey called Mole's Breath. Very few of these names would help you pick the colour out of a line-up. That is more or less the point.

Some of the names are older than they sound. Dead Salmon comes from a decorator's bill of 1805 found at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, which charged for painting the library in "dead salmon".¹² In the trade of the time "dead" meant a flat, matt finish. The fish was never involved.¹²

Elephant's Breath has a stranger history. The modern colour is credited to John Fowler, the English decorator, and is described as a mid grey with a hint of magenta that can look almost lilac in cool light. But the name turns up as early as 1874, when it was used for "a beautiful shade of blue with a sort of mistiness about it".³ So the name has stayed put while the colour underneath it changed.

The newer names are mostly the work of Joa Studholme, the company's colour curator. Asked how she does it, she said there is no exact science and that the names come "pretty much straight out of my head". Mole's Breath, for example, began as a deeper version of Elephant's Breath, and she simply asked herself which animal might go with the darker shade.⁴ Some names carry a literary charge. The range includes a red called Incarnadine,⁵ a word most English speakers know, if at all, from Macbeth, where the murderer says his bloody hand would sooner "the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red".⁶ It is an unusual thing to put on a kitchen wall.

When colour names were meant to be exact

For most of the history of colour naming, the aim was the opposite. In 1774 the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner published a system of colour terms for describing minerals. In 1814 the Edinburgh flower painter Patrick Syme expanded it into Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, adding painted swatches and examples of where each colour occurs in animals, plants and minerals, and taking it to more than a hundred named colours.⁷⁸ The names read like poetry now, but each one was pinned to something you could go and check. Skimmed Milk White, for instance, is the white of the human eyeball, the back of the petals of blue hepatica, and common opal.⁸⁹ Elsewhere in the book are Orpiment Orange and Arterial Blood Red.⁹

Charles Darwin took a copy on the Beagle in 1831. Preserved specimens faded, so colour had to be recorded on the spot, and he later told the naturalist Leonard Jenyns that "a comparison was always made with the book in hand".¹⁰ He borrowed Syme's vocabulary directly, describing the shifting colours of a cuttlefish as varying "between a hyacinth red and a chestnut brown".⁷¹⁰ There is a neat loop here. More recently the Natural History Museum in London worked with Farrow & Ball on a range of paints matched to Syme's swatches, keeping his original names such as Dutch Orange and Broccoli Brown.⁷

Syme's names were there to make a colour findable. Elephant's Breath works the other way. It tells you very little about what you will see and quite a lot about the kind of room it is meant for.

What the research says about vague names

There is some evidence that vagueness helps. In 2005 the marketing researchers Elizabeth Miller of Boston College and Barbara Kahn of Wharton published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research on colour and flavour names. They sorted names into plain ones (light yellow), plain but specific ones (lemon yellow), unexpected but specific ones (Kermit green) and ambiguous ones (Party yellow, Moody blue). Students choosing jellybeans and picking sweaters from a catalogue preferred the ambiguous names to the ordinary ones.¹¹¹²

Their explanation drew on the philosopher Paul Grice. When someone says something that seems unhelpful, we tend to assume they still meant something by it and fill in the gap ourselves. A puzzling name makes the buyer do a little work, and that work seems to make the product feel more satisfying. The effect had limits. People who saw the colour swatch before the ambiguous name liked it less, and Kahn suggested that very odd names might backfire and that the effect could wear off as shoppers get used to it.¹¹

A label can also change the experience itself, not just the choice. In a 2008 study at Caltech, Hilke Plassmann, Antonio Rangel and colleagues gave 20 people Cabernet Sauvignon in a brain scanner, sometimes presenting the same wine at two different prices. Participants said the "expensive" version tasted better, and activity rose in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain area linked to experienced pleasure. In a later tasting with no prices shown, they rated the cheapest wine highest.¹³¹⁴ Nobody has put Elephant's Breath in an MRI machine, but the principle is the same one the paint chart is relying on. What you are told about a thing becomes part of how you perceive it.

That gives the history a slightly comic shape. Werner and Syme built a naming system so that a colour seen on a mineral sample or a cuttlefish in the Atlantic could be recorded without ambiguity. Two centuries later, ambiguity is what sells the paint, and the company doing it has been happy to borrow Syme's names as well.