The Strange History of Blue: The Last Color Humans Named

Homer's Wine-Dark Sea

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as "wine-dark" (oinops pontos). He calls the sky "bronze." Honey is "green." Sheep are "violet." Nowhere in the entire Homeric corpus — over 27,000 lines — does the word "blue" appear. This peculiarity was first noted by the British Prime Minister and classical scholar William Gladstone in his 1858 study Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age.

Gladstone initially suggested that the ancient Greeks might have had deficient color vision. But this was quickly ruled out — there is no evidence of widespread color blindness in ancient Mediterranean populations. The answer lay not in biology but in language.

Geiger's Universal Pattern

The German philologist Lazarus Geiger picked up where Gladstone left off. In the 1870s, he analyzed ancient texts from Icelandic sagas, the Quran, ancient Chinese stories, Hindu Vedic hymns, and the Hebrew Bible. His finding was striking: the same pattern appeared across all of them. Colors entered languages in a remarkably consistent order.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay formalized this in their landmark 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Studying 98 languages, they proposed a universal hierarchy:

Blue is consistently among the last basic color terms to emerge. The only ancient civilization with an early word for blue was Egypt — and not coincidentally, the Egyptians were the only ancient people who manufactured a blue pigment.

Can You See a Color Without a Word for It?

This question — a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — was dramatically tested by researcher Jules Davidoff of Goldsmiths, University of London. In a study published in Nature (1999), Davidoff worked with the Himba tribe of Namibia, whose language has no distinct word for blue but has multiple terms for different greens.

When shown a circle of green squares with one blue square, Himba participants struggled to identify the odd one out. However, when shown a circle of green squares with one that was a slightly different shade of green (a distinction they have vocabulary for but English speakers do not), they spotted it instantly. English speakers struggled with that same test.

The implication is powerful: language does not determine what we can see, but it strongly influences what we notice and how quickly we categorize it. Having distinct color terms — like the ones you see on our Color Wheel — literally shapes perception.

Egyptian Blue: The First Synthetic Pigment

Around 2200 BC, Egyptian artisans created the world's first synthetic pigment: Egyptian blue (calcium copper silicate, CaCuSi₂O₆). They heated a mixture of limestone, sand, and a copper compound (malachite or azurite) with natron (a natural flux) to approximately 850–1000°C. The result was a vivid #1034A6 blue that was stable, opaque, and could be ground into a versatile pigment.

Egyptian blue was used for over 3,000 years across the Mediterranean world. It colored the famous bust of Nefertiti, the frescoes of Pompeii, and Roman wall paintings. The recipe was eventually lost after the fall of Rome and was not rediscovered until the 19th century when chemist Humphry Davy analyzed samples from Pompeii in 1815. In 2006, researchers at the Getty Conservation Institute discovered that Egyptian blue emits near-infrared light when excited — making it detectable even when invisible to the naked eye, useful for identifying it in ancient artworks.

Ultramarine: More Precious Than Gold

For much of European history, the most prized blue pigment was ultramarine, extracted from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. The only significant source was the mines of Badakhshan in what is now northeastern Afghanistan — hence the name "ultramarine" (Latin: ultramarinus, "beyond the sea").

Producing ultramarine was an extraordinarily labor-intensive process. The stone was ground, mixed with wax, resins, and oils, then repeatedly kneaded and washed. Early washes produced the highest quality blue #120A8F; later washes yielded progressively grayer pigment. In 15th-century Europe, ultramarine cost more per ounce than gold. Renaissance patrons specified its use in contracts — it was reserved for the most important figures, typically the Virgin Mary's robe.

Vermeer was famous for his lavish use of ultramarine, notably in Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). His spending on the pigment may have contributed to his family's debt after his death. Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment(c. 1500–01) unfinished, reportedly because he could not afford enough ultramarine.

The breakthrough came in 1826 when French chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet synthesized artificial ultramarine at a fraction of the cost, winning a prize offered by the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale. Overnight, the most expensive pigment in history became accessible to everyone.

International Klein Blue: Art as Color

In 1960, French artist Yves Klein patented International Klein Blue (IKB), a deep #002FA7 ultramarine suspended in a synthetic resin binder (Rhodopas M60A) developed with Parisian paint dealer Edouard Adam. The resin preserved the matte, luminous quality of dry pigment — unlike traditional oil binders that darkened and dulled it. Klein used IKB exclusively for monochrome paintings, declaring that blue "has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions."

YInMn Blue: Discovered by Accident in 2009

The newest blue was discovered entirely by accident. In 2009, Mas Subramanian, a professor of materials science at Oregon State University, was researching new materials for electronics applications. His graduate student Andrew Smith mixed yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides and heated them to approximately 1200°C. The sample came out of the furnace a brilliant, vivid blue.

Named YInMn Blue (for its constituent elements: Yttrium, Indium, Manganese), the pigment #2E5090 has remarkable properties: it is non-toxic (unlike cobalt or Prussian blue), UV-stable (unlike many organic blues), reflects near-infrared light (keeping surfaces cool), and is extremely durable. It was the first new inorganic blue pigment discovered in over 200 years.

The Shepherd Color Company licensed YInMn Blue for commercial use, and Crayola released a crayon called "Bluetiful" based on it in 2017. The pigment was approved by the EPA for industrial use and is now available as an artist's pigment.

Blue in the Digital Age

Today, blue dominates the digital landscape. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Samsung, HP, Intel, IBM, Visa, PayPal — the list of blue-branded tech companies is staggering. Research by Joe Hallock (published in his 2003 study "Colour Assignment") found that blue is the most preferred color across cultures, genders, and age groups. It conveys trust, stability, and competence — exactly what technology companies want to project.

The specific blue matters. Facebook's #1877F2 was famously chosen partly because Mark Zuckerberg has red-green color blindness and blue is the color he sees most vividly. Twitter's original #1DA1F2 was lighter and friendlier, projecting openness and communication.

Conclusion

Blue's story spans from the absence of a word in ancient Greek to a $35 pigment accidentally created in an Oregon lab. It is a color that was once rarer than gold and is now the default choice for half the internet. It is a color that some cultures literally could not name, and that others considered divine.

Explore the full spectrum of blues — from Egyptian #1034A6 to Klein's #002FA7 to YInMn's #2E5090 — on our color palette collection or build your own blue-themed palette with the Color Wheel.