J Crew classic satin ballet flats in Pale Peacock and Toasted Honey

[cimorene]

Sometimes I want to crash the national convention of professional color namers and smack them all with a giant wet, scaly dead fish, you know?

Comments

[krait]

B-b-but! I love colour names! :D I always thought I would like to be the person at Crayola who's responsible for coming up with names for crayon colours, because I am picky and I do see the distinctions between Royal Blue and Midnight Blue and between Red-Orange and Orange-Red.

[cimorene]

You've probably noticed a tendency at Crayola, in the tradition of many other makers of more professional art supplies, to be more descriptive, less fanciful, in their color names. There's nothing wrong with "red-orange" and "orange-red": that's exactly the kind of color names I like! Likewise colors named after the materials used historically to produce them in paint. These namers are safe from all piscine attacks, believe me. My ire is directed at people who name fabric, apparel, and paint chip colors with things like "Pale Peacock", which is a nonsensical suggestion anyway, and suggests something much bluer than the color up there, since green is not the dominant color on a peacock; or "Toasted Honey", when you can't actually toast honey at all, and the color in question is nothing like the result of combining the color of honey with the color of toast. Paint chip colors are way worse, though. They frequently have no discernable relationship to the colors they're naming whatsoever, which I think is actually dumber than a misleading or slightly wrong-headed one.