Lavender (color)

Lavender is a light shade of purple or violet. It applies particularly to the color of the flower of the same name. The web color called lavender is displayed adjacent—it matches the color of the palest part of the lavender flower; however, the more saturated color shown as floral lavender more closely matches the average color of the lavender flower as shown in the picture and is the tone of lavender historically and traditionally considered lavender by the average person as opposed to those who are website designers. The color lavender might be described as a medium purple or a light pinkish-purple. The term lavender may be used in general to apply to a wide range of pale, light, or grayish-purples, but only on the blue side; lilac is pale purple on the pink side. In paints, the color lavender is made by mixing purple and white paint. The first recorded use of the word lavender as a color term in English was in 1705. Originally, the name lavender only applied to flowers. By 1930, the book A Dictionary of Color identified three major shades of lavender—[floral] lavender, lavender gray, and lavender blue, and in addition a fourth shade of lavender called old lavender (a dark lavender gray) (all four of these shades of lavender are shown below). By 1955, the publication of the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Color Names (a color dictionary used by stamp collectors to identify the colors of stamps), now on the Internet, listed dozens of different shades of lavender. Today, although the color floral lavender (the color of the flower of the lavender plant) remains the standard for lavender, just as there are many shades of pink (light red, light rose, and light magenta colors), there are many shades of lavender (some light magenta, some light purple, [mostly] light violet [as well as some grayish-violet], and some light indigo colors). Displayed at right is the web color lavender blush. It is a pale pinkish tone of lavender. The color designated as the web color lavender is a very pale tint of lavender that in other (artistic) contexts may be described as lavender mist.