The colour "carmine".

Question

In the autumn, I bought a batch of hyacinths, which have just started to flower. Half of them were light pink, and have flowered exactly as I expected. The other half were described as "carmine", which I took to be a pink which is both deep and bright, almost a luminous pink. Furthermore, I always imagined that carmine would be a pure pink, with no element of purple in it. What has actually flowered is a purple-pink, too dark for my taste, but which my next door neighbour thinks is beautiful.

To try to find a good source of information on colours, I have visited the site:-
http://koning.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/demo/Colors.html
This shows carmine as even more purple than my hyacinths actually are. But I don't know whether I can really trust this webpage. Surely, their renditions of charcoal, medium violet, paleviolet, burgundy, purple, cobalt etc are all wrong. I wonder how many people own a canary the colour they show. And I would think twice before eating an apricot of the colour that they depict.

My question is whether their rendition of carmine is correct. Or is carmine more like the colour that they represent as "hot pink", which is what I was aiming for when I bought the hyacinth bulbs?
Is there any adjustment that I should make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?

Richard Chambers Leeds UK.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]My question is whether their rendition of carmine is correct. Or is carmine more like the colour that they represent as "hot pink", which is what I was aiming for when I bought the hyacinth bulbs?[/nq]
Before the discussion starts - isn't carmine a synonym for crimson?
[nq:1]Is there any adjustment that I should make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]
No chance to decide this, I think, from other similar discussions in other newsgroups.
Best regards
Steffen

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In the autumn, I bought a batch of hyacinths, which have just started to flower. Half of them were light ... make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]
It's your monitor and not your computer. Go to Control Panel and click "Adobe Gamma" and go through the steps. There are other ways, but without buying a color correction program this is the best you can do. See: http://www.xig.com/Summit-help/monitor.html#monitor for some links to color correction.
You will never be sure. What you see on your monitor, no matter how you calibrate it, is not what someone else will see on their monitor or what you will see if you change monitors.
My Sony Trinitron monitor has three settings: standard, presentation, and graphics. If I calibrate in the standard mode, the colors are quite different if I switch to presentation mode.

Usenet · Answer

(carmine)
[nq:1]To try to find a good source of information on colours, I have visited the site:- http://koning.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/demo/Colors.html This shows carmine ... make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]Color names are hard to define, both because perception of color is subjective, and because the names themselves tend to be used very broadly. There are various systems that attempt to make the definitions more objective. I consulted the American Heritage Dictionary, whose color definitions sound objective, but even they admit, "If some of the color-name definitions in this Dictionary seem to cover a wider range than seems familiar, it is because different sources have based standards on different samples representing the same name." They define carmine as "A strong to vivid red color." Pasting the color on the webpage into Paint, I then discovered that it had a hue of 194, which is actually closer to blue (hue 160) than red (hue 255).

Also, I noticed that the webpage shows "dark gray" as being lighter in luminosity than "gray." That can't be right! So don't adjust your set I'm sure there are other sites that do a better job.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In the autumn, I bought a batch of hyacinths, which have just started to flower. Half of them were light ... make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]
Besides the question of whether your monitor can be adjusted, there is the page itself. What you gave us a link to must be list of official HTML colors, or something close to it. Those are fixed commands you can put in HTML pages to set particular colors. When you see "blanchedalmond" and "moccasin," you know you're looking at that list.

We've seen before that some of the names assigned to those shades are not necessarily what ordinary people, or professionals in fields involving color, would use.
I remember they got "puce" wrong but on the page you found, they don't even try to display a color for puce, it's in black. Maybe they've tried to rectify their error by removing it from service?... The word "puce" does display in color when I open the same page in my Navigator, which is older, and it indeed shows the wrong color some people think puce is green, but it's supposed to be brownish-red.

Navigator shows "persimmon" in color, too, which doesn't happen for that page in my Explorer. So there's another variable: the way one's browser interprets the HTML.
You can find other pages that list these same HTML color names and see how they compare. For example:
http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/tutors/colors.html

I believe there has been some changing around of the HTML standards, where some names were dropped and others were added.

I remember it was hard to find any color charts on the Web, with names, that didn't relate to those HTML colors. Someone found one related to Setacolor paints:
http://www.lainesworld.co.uk/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store Cod e=L&Category Code=setac
But there's no carmine, crimson, persimmon, or puce there.

So I tried putting those four words in Google. Here's a site that tries to match up all sorts of colors to names, including foreign ones: http://www.coloria.net/bonus/colornames.htm
Their idea of "crimson" is a bit lighter than I expected, but the others come out close enough for me.

Best Donna Richoux

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]... Here's a site that tries to match up all sorts of colors to names, including foreign ones: http://www.coloria.net/bonus/colornames.htm Their idea of "crimson" is a bit lighter than I expected, but the others come out close enough for me.[/nq]
This site is amazingly comprehensive, but searching within it for "carmine" and "crimson" one finds these words used for a most unhelpful variety of colours, some far removed from at least the BrE idea of what they might denote. Here's the list for one colour (chosen at random) that I'd say was a light creamy pink, or perhaps what an old children's paint box would have labelled "flesh" (meaning of course "idealised white child's skin"):

Night cloud / New blue / Gray / Wan blue / Bluish white / Alabaster tint / Fairy princess / Firmament gray / Vapor blue / Venus blue / Steam blue / Rose ash / Reddish white / Pink tint / Pewter cream / Peach gray / Pearl cream / Blue wash / Blue tint / Frosty night
Whatever distortion my monitor may have introduced, how can "pink tint" or "reddish white" be reconciled with all those blues? Even if one eliminates the purely fanciful, this list demonstrates how useless words are to define colours: fortunately it was headed by a code number, which is presumably what a designer would use when specifying the colour.

Alan Jones

Usenet · Answer

These are nice, almost poetic names. And so is "carmine", which originates from cinabar.
What do you make of the prosaic "vermillion", which comes from "worm"?

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In the autumn, I bought a batch of hyacinths, which have just started to flower. Half of them were light ... make to my computer settings to make the colours from this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]
Like you, I see it on that site as a pink tending to purple colour. Whether that's my monitor or not I couldn't say.
It's not what I think of as carmine, which got fixed in my mind at a very early age with my first box of oil paints. Wonderful names like burnt sienna and prussian blue. Carmine was very close to crimson lake. I note from OED that 'carmine' is derived from 'carminic acid' which is the colouring matter of cochineal. And I remember cochineal vividly (arf) from the little bottles my Mother had, from which two or three drops would colour a bag of white icing pink. Cochineal is a deep red or scarlet, therefore I take it that carmine is intended to describe a deep red, like the scarlet or crimson on the website you refer to.

John Dean
Oxford

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]In the autumn, I bought a batch of hyacinths, which ... this website accurate, or is the website itself at fault?[/nq]
[nq:1]Like you, I see it on that site as a pink tending to purple colour. Whether that's my monitor or ... that carmine is intended to describe a deep red, like the scarlet or crimson on the website you refer to.[/nq]
Don't trust any human on colours: the nearest you can get is some almost non-human international standard available to everybody somewhere (people out there will know where). In particular, assume that any gardening catalogue is lying when it says "blue". Some swine sold me a "blue" buddleia once, and it still rankles.

Norman Douglas has an interesting passage on Southern-Italian colour words in Old Calabria: but I imagine everybody here has read it.

Mike.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]... Here's a site that tries to match up all ... expected, but the others come out close enough for me.[/nq]
[nq:1]This site is amazingly comprehensive, but searching within it for "carmine" and "crimson" one finds these words used for a most unhelpful variety of colours, some far removed from at least the BrE idea of what they might denote.[/nq]
I didn't realize how many times the same name appears. I see you have to watch the capital letters (punctuation would have helped) because there are three possibilities:
Name Carmine
Modified name Yellowish carmine
Name-modifying other Carmine rose
Although most of the plain "Carmine" entries are what I'd call dark red, I did see at least one pinkish red and one medium red, before I gave up.

I don't see any explanatory notes (the home page is in Finnish). I take it someone had good reason to think that these names had actually been used in these multiple, nonstandardized ways.
[nq:1]Here's the list for one colour (chosen at random) that I'd say was a light creamy pink, or perhaps what ... fortunately it was headed by a code number, which is presumably what a designer would use when specifying the colour.[/nq]
I see what you mean. The names like "Blue tint" I oculd explain you start with something else (vaguely pink), add a little blue to it, and you get this shade of pink. But why anyone should have named this color something like "Vapor blue" or "Venus blue" is beyond me.

The color number at that row is #F9DFCF, if anyone else wants to take a look.
Can I plug that code number into one of the standard Macintosh color tools? Yes, I don't know how it's set up on Windows, but there are half-a-dozen color selection tools on the Mac, and one of them allows me to type in the HTML code. The resulting color is the same as on that Coloria page, which is as it should be (a soft pink).

Best Donna Richoux

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]These are nice, almost poetic names. And so is "carmine", which originates from cinabar. What do you make of the prosaic "vermillion", which comes from "worm"?[/nq]
It would be too cumbersome to copy and paste them all here, but I suggest you look at the etymologies in M-W.com for "carmine," "vermillion," "crimson," and the related words "cochineal" and "kermis." They're apparently more related than you think.
I gather there were two ancient sources for reddish dye (at least) one was from the cochineal insect, kermes. At times, that color has been called crimson, carmine and vermillion, as far as I can sort out. The other source of dye was the mineral cinnabar, and although I haven't nailed it down, it looks like both "carmine" and "vermillion" have been applied to the resulting pigment, as well.
I see that reds and purples were discussed here a year ago. I wrote then:
For "crimson," T-B (Thorndike-Barnhart) has "a deep red" for meaning. The derivation goes from Italian cremisino, through Arabic qrmiz, "the kermis insect from which a red dye was derived," and that goes back to Sanskrit, krmis. "Carmine" appears to be a cognate.
There's an interesting website where students in a class on "Chemistry and Art" wrote summary reports on a number of pigments the origin of the names, as well as how they were produced, what they were used for, etc. I saw what has to be one error, but overall I think a lot of thought and care was put into these:
http://www.sewanee.edu/chem/Chem&Art/Detail Pages/Pigments/Pigments

Discussed are:
· Alizarin
· Calcium Carbonate
· Chromium Oxide
· Gamboge
· Green Earth
· Indigo
· Lead-Tin Yellow
· Malachite
· Prussian Blue
· Red Earth
· Ultramarine
· Verdigris
· Vermillion
· Yellow Ochre
· Zinc White

Best Donna Richoux

The colour "carmine".

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