The Color We Trust Most
From rare stone to everyday shade, what history, language, and science reveal.
The lights dimmed and suddenly, I was back in 2006. The Devil Wears Prada had just unfolded on the West End stage, and everyone in the theatre was waiting for it: the monologue about the “cerulean sweater.”
On stage, just as on screen, the scene landed like a knife. Andy, the young assistant, laughs all too audibly at two belts and post enquiry, insists they look the same. To this, Miranda’s eyes narrow. Calmly, she just points to Andy’s jumper and begins the slow dismantling.
You go to your closet, and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.
But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.
And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs.
And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact…you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of "stuff."
Line by line, Miranda traces cerulean’s path from couture runways to clearance bins, until the punchline lands cold.
If one sweater can carry that much history, what about the color itself? Follow the thread back and you meet miners, merchants, monks, alchemists, and chemists.
Let’s go back to where it began.
🧵 Threads in Time 🧵
Today, blue saturates our lives, from denim to school uniforms. Yet for most of history it was the rarest color of all. To follow its trail is to move through discovery, loss, reinvention, and trade.
Lapis Lazuli
The story begins with stone. In the mountains of Afghanistan, lapis lazuli was mined as early as 4500 BCE. Traders carried it to Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it adorned jewelry, amulets, and the golden mask of Tutankhamun. Its deep, celestial tone was not yet paint but a raw material, a symbol of power more precious than gold.
Egyptian Blue
Then came invention. Around 3250 BCE, Egyptian artisans discovered how to make the first synthetic pigment in history. By heating copper, sand, and lime, they created Egyptian blue. For the first time, blue was no longer dug from the earth but made by human hands. It glowed in the dim light of temples, tied to eternity itself. After Rome’s decline, the method was forgotten, and for more than a thousand years Egyptian blue slipped from memory.
Azurite
Into that absence stepped other minerals. Azurite, a copper ore, gave a lighter but vivid pigment. Affordable and accessible, it colored manuscripts and church walls across Europe. Yet it carried a flaw: time betrayed it, the bright blue darkening into a murky green.
Han Blue
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Chinese artisans found their own solution. During the Western Zhou dynasty (around 1000 BCE), they developed Han blue, chemically similar to Egyptian blue. It coated ceramics, bronzes, and the armor of the Terracotta Army. The impulse the same all the while: to capture what nature offered so rarely.
Maya Blue
Across the ocean, the Maya invented something entirely different. Around 800 CE they bound indigo dye to clay, creating Maya blue: a pigment so durable it resisted sun, heat, and humidity. Murals and pottery still blaze with it more than a thousand years later. Where Egyptian blue was forgotten, Maya blue proved almost eternal, baffling modern scientists until the recipe was rediscovered in the 20th century.
Ultramarine
Back in Europe, lapis lazuli took on new life. Ground into ultramarine, literally “from beyond the seas,” it became the most coveted pigment of the Renaissance. Giotto, Michelangelo, and Vermeer reserved it for the Virgin Mary’s robes, and patrons rationed it in contracts, so coveted it was.
Prussian Blue
The modern story began by accident. In 1704, a Berlin alchemist failed at making a red pigment and instead stumbled upon Prussian blue. Unlike azurite, it did not fade. Unlike ultramarine, it was cheap. Suddenly vivid, stable blue could be produced at scale. It spread across Europe. For the first time, blue belonged to everyone.
Cerulean Blue
Prepared in 1805 and finally sold in the 1860s, cerulean caught the clear light of sky and water better than any pigment before. Monet and his peers brushed it across canvases to pin down fleeting shifts of atmosphere. A century later, it became famous again in cinema with the “cerulean sweater.”
What began as a pigment too rare for daily use has become the most familiar of all. Once reserved for gods and kings, blue now dresses mannequins in shopping galleries, available to the masses.
✨ Golden Threads ✨
Blue is not just a tale of pigments. It is a story of perception, language, and how cultures choose to name what they see. And indeed, here we must be careful, because much of what gets repeated about blue is misleading.
Take the myth you’ll find everywhere online: that ancient people could not see blue. They could… their eyes were no different from ours. What changed was language. Many early tongues grouped shades we now split apart. Old Norse used blár for both dark blue and blue-black, like raven feathers. Russian still distinguishes light (goluboy) and dark (siniy) blues. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” was not evidence of blindness but a metaphor, capturing motion and mood more than hue. As linguists Berlin and Kay showed in their landmark study of color terms (1969), languages develop color categories in stages. Categories shift with culture, not with vision.
Why does the myth persist? Well, it’s a neat narrative for one. And, clickbait dressed as anthropology. But at the heart of it is simply that cultures carved the spectrum differently. Myths thrive because the messy answer is less shareable than the tidy fiction. I’d thoroughly recommend Slow Boring’s ‘The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue’ for a deep dive.
Physics adds its own tricks.Many animals shimmer blue not through pigment but through structural coloration, where microscopic structures scatter light. To our eyes, the result is no less blue. On a larger scale, the sky looks blue because shorter wavelengths scatter more widely in the atmosphere. Water often appears blue because it absorbs red wavelengths and leaves the shorter ones behind. In both cases, color is not “inside” the thing itself. It is light filtered by the world and interpreted by the brain.
Serendipity also shapes the palette. A Berlin alchemist aiming for red instead created Prussian blue. A Swiss chemist refined cerulean, giving painters a pigment that caught the clean light of sky and water. Chemistry made blue stable and affordable.
And here is where psychology also took hold. Across decades of surveys in Europe, Asia, and the US, blue consistently ranks as the world’s most popular color, often named by more than 40% of participants. In marketing research, people describe it as calming, trustworthy, and dependable. Banks, airlines, and tech companies saturate their branding with blue precisely because we read it that way.
The Virgin’s robes painted in ultramarine, the indigo that stained hands and cloth in global trade, the endless dome of sky above, all echoing our instinctive sense that blue is safe, steady, even infinite…
And now, so ordinary we forget it was ever extraordinary.
🪡 Stray Threads 🪡
“Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not.” — Yves Klein.
📚 Threads Unraveled 📚
Want to keep pulling the thread? Below are a few you can pull if time allows:
A painter, filmmaker, and writer, Jarman meditates on each color as he was losing his sight to AIDS. Blue was the last color he could see.
📚 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost,' by Rebecca Solnit
In her essays on wandering and distance, Solnit writes of blue as the color of horizons and longing, the shade of what is always just out of reach.
📚 'Color: A Natural History of the Palette,' by Victoria Finlay
A travelogue into the origins of pigments, from Afghan lapis lazuli to Renaissance ultramarine. Her chapter on blue shows how geography, trade, and myth gave it power.
📚 'The Secret Lives of Colour,' by Kassia St. Clair
A cultural history of hues, with an excellent entry on ultramarine and indigo. Each color a miniature biography of art, science, and human obsession.
A lyrical, fragmentary book of philosophy and memoir that circles obsessively around the color blue, desire, and loss.
💬 When did blue last stop you in your tracks?
Until next time!
– Veronica Quinn.