Tyrian Purple was the original 'forbidden color'. It was so difficult to produce this dye – 12,000 sea snails were required to color one garment – that royalty would execute anyone else daring to wear it. It wasn't until the late 1800's that chemistry made a cost-effective purple dye a reality.
Purple in the Elizabethan era (1558–1603), under Sumptuary law, enforced by Queen Elizabeth I, purple fabrics are forbidden for all the classes of people except the royal family.
Purple as a color doesn't necessarily even exist, kind of like magenta, due to it not having a static wavelength.
Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
Professor Q explains to his class why purple was omitted on country flags. The real reason was that for thousands of years purple dye was far too expensive. It was possible the most expensive product available being worth more than gold, jewels, castles, ships, silk, spices, and silver.
The color purple stimulates the brain activity used in problem solving, while also being a feminine and romantic color.
Purple Color Psychology
In color psychology, purple is a royal color. The color meaning for purple is connected to power, nobility, luxury, wisdom, and spirituality. But avoid using the color too much as it can cause feelings of frustration. Some perceive its overuse as arrogant.
Variations of purple convey different meanings: Light purples are light-hearted, floral, and romantic. The dark shades are more intellectual and dignified. The negative meanings of purple are decadence, conceit, and pomposity. Purple is also a color of mourning.
In nature, a lot of deadly plants and animals display bright colours as a warning to keep away. While deadly poisons are found in nature, these can also be created synthetically, and bright and unnatural colours such as green and purple reflect the dangerous, unnatural properties of these substances.
During the period of the Roman empire, the emperor was the only person who could wear the imperial color purple, while only official seers could wear purple and saffron combined. Purple's exclusivity also carried over to the Elizabethan era (1558 to 1603) in England.
Mind you, just a hint! So now we know why purple, which still has a “wow” factor about it, is never spotted on any country's national flag!
Purple also represents wisdom and spirituality. 6 Its rare and mysterious nature perhaps causes it to seem connected to the unknown, supernatural, and divine. Different shades of purple have different spiritual meanings.
Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue. Conversely, for creative tasks such as brainstorming, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs as when under the red colour condition.
The wavelength of violet is 400 nanometers making it the smallest–and strongest–of all colors. This may explain why purple is associated with supernatural energy. Purple is also associated with magic, mystery, spirituality, creativity, dignity and royalty.
In Japan, ordinary people were forbidden to wear purple clothes for a long time. The color purple, murasaki (紫) in Japanese, used to be very rarely seen because it was difficult and time-consuming to make.
Purple is common in plants, largely thanks to a group of chemicals called anthocyanins. When it comes to animals, however, purple is more difficult to produce. Mammals are unable to create pigments for purple, blue or green. Birds and insects are only able to display purple through structural colouration.
Purple is one of the least used colours in vexillology and heraldry. Currently, the colour appears in only three national flags: that of Dominica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and one co-official national flag, the Wiphala (co-official national flag of Bolivia).
In many cultures, black is thought to be unlucky and black cats, in particular, are said to bring bad luck to anyone that crosses their path. In China, white is generally seen as unlucky, while Brazil and Thailand consider purple to be a colour that can bring about misfortune to anyone who uses it outside of a funeral.
Colors. Black is the color of mourning in many European cultures. Black clothing is typically worn at funerals to show mourning for the death of the person.
Black. Donning dark colors for mourning has been strongly associated with death and loss for centuries in the west and is a practice believed to date back to the Roman times. In the early 1900s, black jewelry made from polished stone, jet, was particularly popular in the form of mourning brooches and mourning rings.
“Red” “Red” was indicated among the top three colors for anger, followed by jealousy, fear, and envy, respectively (Figure 2).
Undoubtedly, the strongest link between an individual emotion and color is “red” and anger, which has been noted across studies and formats (e.g., Kaya and Epps, 2004; Sutton and Altarriba, 2016).