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This article is about the color.
For other uses, see .
Violet as a tertiary color
  purple
  violet
  blue
Violet is the color of ,
and . It takes its name from the
is at the end, with the lowest wavelength of 380-450 nanometers (in experiments under special conditions, people have so far seen to 310 nm). Light with a shorter wavelength than violet but longer than
is called . In the
historically used by painters, it is located between
and . On the screens of computer monitors and television sets, a color which looks similar to violet is made, with the , by mixing red and blue light, with the blue twice as bright as the red. This is not true violet, since it is composed of multiple longer wavelengths rather than a single wavelength shorter than that of blue light.
Violet an but violet is a true color, with its own wavelength on the spectrum of visible light, while purple is a composite color, made by combining blue and red.
In history, violet and purple have long been associated with royalty and majesty, the Emperors of Rome wore purple togas, as did the Byzantine Emperors. During the
it was worn by
and university professors, and was often used in art as the color of the robes of the .
According to surveys in Europe and the United States, violet is the color people most often associate with extravagance and individualism, the unconventional, the artificial, and ambiguity.
In , the color violet represents the harmony of the
because it is a combination of
( respectively). In
violet is associated with the .
and old French violette, and from the Latin viola, the names of the
flower. The first recorded use of violet as a color name in English was in 1370. Violet can also refer to the first violas which were originally painted a similar color. In Arabic language Violet color is called Nile and the dye Nilege made from Viola flower (of the violet color) which was dominant on the shores of the Nile River, giving the Nile color as the name of the Nile river. The Violet shade of Blue is called Nili in Contemporary Arabic.[]
fields in the , in
is a pale violet. This is a flower of the
priest in a violet
In the traditional color wheel used by painters, violet and
are both placed between red and blue. Purple occupies the space closer to red, between crimson and violet. Violet is closer to blue, and usually less intense and bright than purple.
From the point of view of optics, violet is a real color: it occupies its own place at the end of the , and was one of the seven
of the spectrum first described by
system, used to create colors on a computer screen or on a color television, violet is simulated by purple, by combining blue light at high intensity with a less intense red light on a black screen. The range of purples is created by combining blue and red ligh the
formed this way line along the "".
While the scientific definition is clear, the cultural definitions are more varied. The color called purple by the French, pourpre, contains more red and half the amount of blue of the color called purple in the United States and the U.K. In German, a more reddish color is sometimes called Purpurrot ("purple-red") to avoid confusion.
The color violet
The color purple
In the traditional Boutet color circle (1708), violet is shown between blue and purple.
Violet is one of the oldest colors used by man. Traces of very dark violet, made by grinding the mineral , mixed with water or animal fat and then brushed on the cave wall or applied with the fingers, are found in the
in , in France, dating back about twenty-five thousand years. It has also been found in the
and . It was sometimes used an alternative to black charcoal. Sticks of manganese, used for drawing, have been found at sites occupied by
man in France and Israel. From the grinding tools at various sites, it appears it may also have been used to color the body and to decorate animal skins. The mineral , a red iron oxide, was also ground to produce a dark red-violet pigment by the artists of the
More recently, the earliest dates on cave paintings have been pushed back farther than 35,000 years. Hand paintings on rock walls in Australia may be even older, dating back as far as 50,000 years.
Berries of the genus , such as , were a common source of dyes in antiquity. The ancient Egyptians made a kind of violet dye by combining the juice of the
with crushed green grapes. The Roman historian
reported that the
used a violet dye made from
to color the clothing of slaves. These dyes made a satisfactory purple, but it faded quickly in sunlight and when washed.
The most famous color of the ancient world was , produced in , on the coast of modern day , in the cities of
and . it was made from two sea snails, the
and the . The process of making the d the shells were first cracked, and the snails were soaked in a basin to allow them to decompose, which m then a tiny gland was removed and the juice extracted from the gland. The juice was placed in the sunlight, where it went through an extraord in the light it turned from milk white to yellow green, then to green, then to violet, then to a deep red violet-purple. The process had to be stopped at exactly the right moment, and then it was used to dye either wool or silk a magnificent and lasting color. Traces of the dye industry, including mountains of snail shells, dating back to 1500 BC, have been found at Ougarit and other sites in Lebanon.
The process was extremely labor-intensive and expensive. When the German chemist Paul Friedander tried to recreate Tyrian purple in 2008, he needed twelve thousand mollusks to create 1.4 ounces of dye, enough to color a handkerchief. In the year 2000 a gram of Tyrian purple made from ten thousand mollusks according to the original formula, cost two thousand euro.
The actual color of Tyrian purple seems to have varied from a reddish to a bluish purple. According to the Roman writer , (1st century BC), the murex coming from northern waters, probably , produced a more bluish color than those of the south, probably . The most valued shades were said to be those closer to the color of dried blood, as seen in the mosaics of the robes of the
in . The chemical composition of the dye from the murex is close to that of the dye from indigo, a slightly reddish blue, and indigo was sometimes used to make a counterfeit Tyrian purple, a crime which was severely punished. What seems to have mattered about Tyrian purple was not its color, but its lustre, richness, its resistance to weather and light, and most of all its high price.
Tyrian purple became the color of kings, nobles, priests and magistrates all around the Mediterranean. In the
of , the belt of
is purple, and the tails of the horses of Trojan warriors are dipped in purple. In the , the blankets on the wedding bed of
are purple. In the poems of
(6th century BC) she celebrates the skill of the dyers of the Greek kingdom of
who made purple footwear, and in the play of
(525–456 BC), Queen
welcomes back her husband
by decorating the palace with purple carpets. In the , it was described the color worn by the priests of . In 950 BC,
was reported to have brought artisans from Tyre to provide purple fabrics to decorate the .
In the , the togas of all citizens were bordered with a purple stripe. During a triumph, the general being honored wore an entirely purple toga bordered in gold. The commander of the army wore a purple cloak, called a paludamentum. During the , purple was reserved for the Emperors. The Emperor
had a the King of Mauritania assassinated for wearing a purple mantle better than his own.
made it punishable by death for anyone else to wear the color. Later, the rulers of the
continued the use of purple as the imperial color, for diplomatic gifts, and for imperial documents and the pages of the Bible. But with the gradual Arab conquest of the empire, the sources of the dye were cut off, and by the 9th century the technique of making the dye was largely forgotten.
Byzantine Emperor
wearing , 6th-century mosaic at , ,
Tyrian purple was made from a sea snail called
Dye bath of Tyrian purple
Violet and purple retained their status as the color of Emperors and princes of the church throughout the long rule of the Byzantine Empire. The Emperor
was crowned wearing a mantle of Tyrian purple from Byzantium. Bishops of the Byzantine church wore white robes with stripes of purple, while government officials wore squares of purple fabric to show their rank. However, after the fall of
in 1453, the color began to lose its imperial status. The great dye works of Constantinople were destroyed, and gradually scarlet, made with dye from the
insect, began to be adopted as the royal color in Europe. In 1464,
decreed that cardinals should wear scarlet rather than purple, since scarlet was considered a finer color. Bishops and archbishops, of a lower status than cardinals, were assigned the color purple, but not the rich Tyrian purple. They wore clothes of a mix of the less expensive
blue overlaid with scarlet from cochineal.
While violet was worn less frequently by Medieval and Renaissance kings and princes, it was worn by the professors of many of Europe's new universities. Their robes were modeled after those of the clergy, and they often square violet caps and violet robes, or black robes with violet trim.
Violet also played an important part in the religious paintings of the Renaissance. Angels and the Virgin Mary were often portrayed wearing violet robes. The 17th-century Florentine painter
advised artists: "If you wish to make a pretty violet color, take fine lac (red lake) and ultramarine blue, in equal parts." For fresco painters, he advised a less-expensive version, made of a mixture of blue
A medieval depiction of the coronation of the Emperor . The bishops wear purple robes, the cardinals wear scarlet, and the Pope wears white.
Madonna and child by
(1395), painted for King
A violet-clad angel from the Resurrection of Christ by Raphael ()
In the 18th century, violet was a color worn by royalty, aristocrats and the wealthy, and by both men and women. Good-quality violet fabric was expensive, and beyond the reach of ordinary people.
Many painters of the 19th century experimented with the uses of the color violet to capture the subtle effects of light.
() made use of violet in the sky and shadows of many of his works, such as his painting of a tiger.
A new synthetic pigment,
(cobalt phosphate), appeared in the second half of the 19th century, broadening the palette of artists. Cobalt violet was used by
() was an avid student of color theory. He used violet in many of his paintings of the 1880s, including his paintings of irises and the swirling and mysterious skies of his starry night paintings, and often combined it with it , yellow. In his painting of his bedroom in Arles (1888), he used several sets of
violet and yellow, red and green, and orange and blue. In a letter about the painting to his brother Theo, he wrote, "The color here...should be suggestive of sleep and repose in general....The walls are a pale violet. The floor is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and the chairs are fresh butter yellow, the sheet and the pillows light lemon green. The bedspread bright scarlet. The window green. The bed table orange. The bowl blue. The doors lilac....The painting should rest the head or the imagination."
In 1856, a young British chemist named
was trying to make a synthetic . His experiments produced instead an unexpected residue, which turned out to be the first synthetic , a deep violet color called , or abbreviated simply to
(the dye being named after the lighter color of the mallow [mauve] flower). Used to dye clothes, it became extremely fashionable among the nobility and upper classes in Europe, particularly after
wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862. Prior to Perkin's discovery, mauve was a color which only the aristocracy and rich could afford to wear. Perkin developed an industrial process, built a factory, and produced the dye by the ton, so almost anyone could wear mauve. It was the first of a series of modern industrial dyes which completely transformed both the chemical industry and fashion.
Charles de Bourbon, the future King
Portrait of Empress
of Russia, by . (State Hermitage Museum).
The Tiger, by Eugène Delacroix, used violet in the sky and shadows.
In England,
painters like
were particularly enchanted by purple and violet. This is April Love (1856).
Nocturne: Trafalgar Square Chelsea Snow (1876)
Portrait of Félix Pissarro (1881), by
Portrait of Caroline Remy de Guebhard, by
(). Mauve became a popular fashion color after the invention of the synthetic dye in 1856.
Vincent's bedroom in Arles, (1888) by .
Irises (1889) by , (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Starry Night, by
(Houston Museum of Art).
In the early 20th century, purple, green and white were the colors of the Women's Suffrage movement, which sought to win the right to vote for women. Later, in the 1970s, in a tribute to the Suffragettes, it became the color of the .
In the 1960s, it was also associated with
drugs, and with the music of , particularly the 1967 song . Later, in the 1980s, it was featured in the song and album
(1984) by the American musician .
The violet or purple necktie became very popular at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, particularly among political and business leaders. It combined the assertiveness and confidence of a red necktie with the sense of peace and cooperation of a blue necktie, and it went well with the blue business suit worn by most national and corporate leaders.[]
Five presidents in the oval office. The two more recent presidents,
and , are wearing violet ties.
Violet is at one end of the spectrum of visible light, between
and the invisible . It has the shortest wavelength of all the visible colors. It is the color the eye sees looking at light with a wavelength of between 380 and 450 nanometers.
In the traditional color wheel used by painters, violet and purple lie between red and blue. Violet is inclined toward blue, while purple is inclined toward red.
Violet colors composed by mixing blue and red light are within the purple colors (the word "purple" is used in the common sense for any color between blue and red). In , a purple is a color along the
and excludes violet. Violet light from the , which can be referred as spectral violet, has only short wavelengths.
Violet objects are objects that reflect violet light. Objects reflecting spectral violet often appear dark, because human vision is relatively insensitive to those wavelengths. Monochromatic lamps emitting spectral-violet wavelengths can be roughly approximated by the color shown below as electric violet.
Violet on a TV or computer screen is made by mixing blue light with a less-intense red light.
The earliest violet pigments used by humans, found in prehistoric cave paintings, were made from the minerals
and . Manganese is still used today by the , a group of , as a traditional pigment for coloring the skin during rituals. It is also used by the
Indians of
to color ritual objects.
The most famous violet-purple dye in the ancient world was , made from a type of sea snail called the , found around the Mediterranean.
In western , residents of the islands made a violet dye similar to Tyrian purple from the . In Central America, the inhabitants made a dye from a different sea snail, the , found on the coasts of
and . The Mayans used this color to dye fabric for religious ceremonies, and the Aztecs used it for paintings of ideograms, where it symbolized royalty.
During the Middle Ages, most artists made purple or violet on their paintings by combining r usually blue azurite or lapis-lazuili with ,
or . They also combined lake colors made by mi using
dye for the blue, and dye made from
for the red.
Mixing of two different colors to dye clothing was considered unnatural and diabolic in Medieval times. Those who dyed blue fabric and red fabric were members of different guilds, and were forbidden to dye any other colors than those of their own guild. Most violet fabric was made by the dyers who worked with red, and who used dye from
or cochineal, so Medieval violet colors were inclined toward red.
, or purple moss, was another common violet dye. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, was made from a Mediterranean
called archil or dyer's moss (), combined with an , usually urine. Orcein began to achieve popularity again in the 19th century, when violet and purple became the color of demi-mourning, worn after a widow or widower had worn black for a certain time, before he or she returned to wearing ordinary colors.
Violet dyes for the clothing of common people from the Middle Ages onward were also made from the
or other red fruit of the genus , or from the . All of these dyes were more reddish than bluish, and faded easily with washing and exposure to sunlight.
A popular new dye which arrived in Europe from the New World during the Renaissance was made from the wood of the
tree (Haematoxylum campechianum), which grew in Spanish Mexico. Depending on the different minerals added to the dye, it produced a blue, red, black or, with the addition of , a violet dye. It made a fine color, but, like earlier dyes, it did not resist sunlight or washing.
In the 18th century, chemists in England, France and Germany began to create the first synthetic dyes. Two synthetic purple dyes were invented at about the same time. Cudbear is a
extracted from
that can be used to dye
and , without the use of . Cudbear was developed by Dr Cuthbert Gordon of : production began in 1758, The lichen is first boiled in a solution of . The mixture is then cooled and
is added and the mixture is kept damp for 3–4 weeks. Then the lichen is dried and ground to powder. The manufacture details were carefully protected, with a ten-feet high wall being built around the manufacturing facility, and staff consisting of Highlanders sworn to secrecy.
French purple was developed in France at about the same time. The lichen is extracted by urine or ammonia. Then the extract is acidified, the dissolved dye precipitates and is washed. Then it is dissolved in ammonia again, the solution is heated in air until it becomes purple, then it i the resulting dye was more solid and stable than other purples.
Cobalt violet is a synthetic pigment that was invented in the second half of the 19th century, and is made by a similar process as ,
and . It is the violet pigment most commonly used today by artists.
, also known as
and Perkin's , was the first synthetic
dye, discovered
in 1856. Its chemical name is 3-amino-2,±9-dimethyl-5-phenyl-7-(p-tolylamino)phenazinium acetate.
In the 1950s, a new family of violet synthetic organic pigments called
came onto the market. It had originally been discovered in 1896, but were not synthetized until 1936, and not manufactured until the 1950s. The colors in the group range from deep red to violet in color, and have the molecular formula C20H12N2O2. They have strong resistance to sunlight and washing, and are used in oil paints, water colors, and acrylics, as well as in automobile coatings and other industrial coatings.
(here eating a small crustacean) lives in extreme depths. It is luminous, and can adjust its light level to match the light coming from the surface, so as not to be visible to predators below.
(Clavaria zollingeri) is a widely distributed species of fungus, or mushroom.
The violet carpenter bee () is one of the largest bees in Europe.
is found in sub-Saharan Africa.
parrot is featured on the national flag of , making it the only national flag in the world with a violet color.
flower takes its name from the
word for .
In Europe and America, violet is in a European survey, only three percent of men and women rated it as their favorite color, ranking it behind blue, green, red, black and yellow (in that order), and tied with orange. Ten percent of respondents rated it their
only brown, pink and gray were more unpopular.
Because of their status as the color of Roman emperors, and as colors worn by monarchs and princes, the colors violet and purple are often associated with luxury. Certain luxury goods, such as watches and jewelry, are often placed in boxes lined with violet velvet, since violet is the complementary color of yellow, and shows gold to best advantage. Chocolates are often wrapped in purple.
in a purple mantle
A jewel box lined with violet velvet
While violet is the color of humility in the symbolism of the Catholic Church, it has exactly the opposite meaning in general society. A European poll in 2000 showed it was the color most commonly associated with vanity. As a color that rarely exists in nature, and a color which by its nature attracts attention, it is seen as a color of individualism and extravagance.
Surveys show that violet and purple are the colors most associated with ambiguity and ambivalence. Violet, positioned between red and blue, can easily be shifted one way or the other, and has no clear identity. Like other intermediate colors, it is seen as equivocal and uncertain.
In , the color violet represents the harmony of the
because it is a combination of
( respectively).
In Japan, violet was a popular color introduced into Japanese dress during the
(794–1185). The dye was made from the root of the alkanet plant (), known as murazaki in Japanese. At about the same time, Japanese painters began to use a pigment made from the same plant.
A Japanese woman in the kimono stye popular in the
(794–1185)
The " Prophetess", , in her system called the
which classifies humans into seven different metaphysical , the "seventh ray" of "Ceremonial Order" is represented by the color violet. People who have this metaphysical psychological type are said to be "on the Violet Ray".
In the , the color violet is used to represent the
The Invocation of the Violet Flame is a system of
practice used in the
and by the
(both Ascended Master Teaching religions).
In the Roman Catholic church, violet is worn by
and , red by , and white by the . Ordinary priests wear black.
In the Roman Catholic and many other , violet is the
and , which respectively celebrate the expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the
and the time for
There is a stained glass window created in the early 1920s in the
in Los Angeles depicting
wearing a violet robe.
After the , which modified many of the rules of the Catholic church, priests began to wear violet robes when celebrating masses for the dead. Black was no longer used, since it was the color of mourning outside the church, and was felt to be inappropriate in a religious ceremony.
In , violet is used to symbolically represent the seventh, crown
Roman Catholic Bishop William Patrick Callahan
who claim to be able to observe the
with their
report that those who are practicing
() often have a violet aura. It is said that people with violet auras are forward looking visionaries who may be in
such as , , , , , or .
At the beginning of the 20th century, violet, green and white were the colors of the
movement in the United States and Britain, seeking the right to vote for women. The colors were said to represent liberty and dignity. For this reason, the postage stamp issued in 1936 to honor , a prominent leader of the suffrage movement in the United States, was colored the reddish tone of violet known as .
In the 1970s, violet, purple, or
were colors of the
or feminist movement.
There is a small
political party in
with about 1,150 members called The Violet Party. The party believes in , a , and that politics should be based on . "The Violet Party" was founded in
stamp (1936), was the reddish tone of violet known as
since violet was a color that represented the
The emblem of the
Movement of the 1970s was , a tribute to the original Women's Suffrage movement.
The , an island in the , is the only nation in the world to have violet in its national flag. The flag features a , a national symbol.
of the Spanish Republic with the
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