In August 2017, at the height of Hurricane Harvey, the United States National Weather Service was pushed to add two shades of purple—an extreme violet and a surprisingly subtle lavender—to the previous full-bodied-Malbec max on their color-coded weather maps of southeast Texas, in order to adequately represent the unprecedented rainfall unleashed by the storm. Similar hues, but for the opposite element, were called upon in Australia back in 2013, when temperature forecasts in the range of 52 to 54 degrees Celsius were so unheard of that the country’s Bureau of Meteorology had to add a new color—a slightly more incandescent amethyst, compared with Texas’s purple rain—to the top of its scale.

During the recent 2019–20 bushfire season in Australia, the worst on record (as its nickname, “the Black Summer,” suggests), temperatures were so hot that meteorologists reportedly “ran out of colors” entirely. 1 The saturated reds and purples you’d expect were blown out by the heat into greys and whites.

New conditions clearly demand new colors, given their effectiveness in communicating essential data to the widest demographics. But coming up with a brand new color, let alone colors, isn’t easy. You could legitimately argue that it’s impossible. I should know, because as a certified chromachemist (pending), I’m engaged in what some might call the quixotic process of inventing one. The real challenge is in formulating something truly new, something no one has ever seen before. Can you really, honestly, imagine a completely new color? 

New “seasonal colors” are perhaps most often associated with the fashion industry, and might thus be considered more frivolous and decorative than utilitarian. Spring 2020’s hottest color? The apropos, if highly insensitively named, “Flame Scarlet,” according to the recent Fashion Color Trend Report produced by the Pantone Color Institute, the New Jersey–based spectrum-monopolizing corporation’s in-house trend forecasting and color consultancy. “Burning bright,” Pantone says, “Flame Scarlet exudes confidence and determination.” 2 Is Flame Scarlet really new? It looks suspiciously like red to me.

As our weather-related examples attest, the invention of colors goes beyond mere decoration: it’s increasingly urgent as a means for us to express new dangers and realities. Colors are useful. We’ve learned from high-contrast warning color combos in nature—skunk black and white, yellow-and-black wasp, poisonous red-and-white polka-dot fly agaric mushrooms—and applied them to our own urban infrastructures. Beyond danger signs, we navigate cities through color: coded subway lines, parking garage levels, and digital maps on our phones.

Rem Koolhaas once identified two main color types, at least when it comes to architecture: “The ones that are integral to a material, or a substance—they cannot be changed—and the ones that are artificial, that can be applied and that transform the appearance of things. The difference between colour and paint.” 3 I’d propose at least a third type: imagined. This category gets us into the realm of interpretation and perception, where our cognitive readings of color can spark memories and associations, and thus pave the way to possible invention. Architect and Delft University of Technology professor Mark Pimlott itemizes further utilitarian chromatic nuances, tied to periods, movements, and motives: painterly modernists (Barragán, Scarpa, Graves, and Hejduk, to whom we might add the more recent painterly postmodernism of David Kohn and postcolonial realism of David Adjaye); 1960s–1970s indexical colorists (Archigram, Hollein, Piano and Rogers, Stirling); and more recent artist-architect disrupters (Herzog & de Meuron with Michael Craig-Martin, Haworth Tompkins with Antoni Malinowski). Koolhaas observed an inevitable post-color millennial commitment “to the authenticity of materials, or even more, to materials that announce their own dematerialisation.” 4 Pimlott reminds us that while “architecture controls by its very nature … color cannot be controlled.” 5 To both of these points, Yoshio Taniguchi famously offered a kind of third way, a chromatic vanishing act, when designing his reflective black and translucent white 2004 Museum of Modern Art extension in New York. As he reportedly told MoMA curator Terence Riley: “If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear.” 6

Ostensibly “new” colors continue to be corralled from the infinite rainbow, coded, mixed, “invented.” Why the scare quotes? Well, isn’t it impossible to invent a truly new color at this point? Yes and no. It’s true that we’re told about new inventions all the time. Even Taniguchi-esque supposed non-colors seem to count. In 2018, color consultant Martin Kesselman created a “new white” with British upper-middle-class paint purveyors Farrow & Ball, described as “a perfect glass of two per cent” milk. 7 Initially named Elliyah (after his daughter), F&B subsequently renamed the paint color after the inventor: Martin Kesselman White. This kind of invention, where a specific shade—a micro slice of the color spectrum, even pure light itself—is claimed and named, has its precedent in artist Yves Klein’s 1960 registration of his particularly intense ultramarine mix of pigment and resin, trademarked “International Klein Blue.”

But come on—we all know that such inventions were merely fresh takes or unique mixes, not an actual completely new color, like the one I’m formulating. Besides, when you think about it, colors are discovered, surely, not actually invented. I’ve personally found encouragement by skipping to the second definition you find for “invention” in the dictionary: “products of the imagination.” Isn’t that what all colors really are? Mere subjective perceptions of light, the sensing and naming of which we’ve all somehow miraculously come to rare, broadly global consensus around, their semiotic meanings notwithstanding? They’re all pigments of our imagination: vague, fuzzy reddish, bluish, greenish approximations that we can all more or less agree on. Surely every color in the rainbow already exists: the seven that Isaac Newton defined, and the at least one million more hues that our human eyes have been scientifically proven to see. How could I actually invent a totally new color? Every possible color is just already out there for us to discover, isn’t it? And haven’t they all been discovered by now?

“You can’t discover a color,” says Mas Subramanian, a chemist at Oregon State University who, in 2009, accidentally produced an inorganic pigment brighter than cobalt. “You can only discover a material that uses a particular reflection of a particular wavelength.” 8 Subramanian’s YInMn Blue, as he subsequently named the color, was the outcome of a failed experiment to find a new material for use in semiconductors, in which he heated yttrium, indium, and manganese (collectively YInMn) oxides to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting material’s crystalline structure absorbs red and green wavelengths, while reflecting almost entirely blue wavelengths.  

So for the actual invention of—if not even just the possibility of discovering—a new color, you might understand why I’ve had to get down to specific wavelengths and reflections thereof. Not only reflections but, crucially, our perceptions of those reflections: the transmissions of electrical signals to the visual cortices of our brains. I’ve been coming to the reluctant conclusion that it’s only here that the potential for true invention lies. We all perceive colors through special cells—photoreceptors—on our retinas, which are split into rods and cones. The latter are responsible for color vision, and most of us humans have three kinds: short , medium, and long wavelengths, or red, green, and blue, via which we can see, if not actually distinguish one by one, the aforementioned million or so colors. Some of us lack one of those cone types, usually red, resulting in color blindness. And a very small percentage of us actually have a fourth type (orange): so-called tetrachromats, who are able to perceive even more distinct colors where others would see identical hues. And by “others,” I mean “men,” because according to University of Washington professor of ophthalmology and color vision researcher Dr. Jay Neitz, only women can have four types of cones, and he estimates only ninety-nine million women in the world have true four-color vision: 1.36 percent of the world’s population. 9 This has admittedly been a slight hindrance for your white male chromachemist correspondent in my new-color quest.

Could truly new colors already be among us, but for the simple matter of them being physiologically discernible to only an unwittingly fortunate 1 percent of us? It’s an extremely limited demographic for new color consumers, granted, but the highest of net worth. Well, cone worth. Of course, the newest new in colors and perception may be even more exclusive: purely the domain of our animal friends. If you’re impressed by four-cone tetrachromats, try the fifteen-photoreceptor common bluebottle butterfly, whose multiple cones handle not only blue, blue-green, and red, but also violet and, most impressively, ultraviolet.

While we can’t all hope to compete with UV butterflies, nor some of us even just with women, we can perhaps take the consolation of inspiration from them. I know I have, and the result is the creation of my brand new color. It’s all about perception and imagination. By that I mean only a tiny minority of us can truly perceive it, but we might all imagine it: something between a jellyfish, the saturated intensity you find on the edge of colored plexiglass, that really bright hue you see on oil slicks, and the iridescence of hummingbird feathers. It’s the color we all need right now: hopeful, agile, fluid, dynamic. It counters the hegemony of ROYGBIV, it’s open to interpretation, it’s pluralistic, and it’s, er, currently unreproducible. But rest assured that I’m hard at work on my next invention: the ink capable of printing it.