Hana Filip, on Facebook two days ago, voicing her taste in colors, initially about a store, and then about the clothes she wears:
— HF: I’m underwhelmed by this pale-earth-tone fad. The photo renders this unhappy situation in one store in my ‘hood [in Düsseldorf, Germany] more colorful than it looks in reality. I love jewel-tone colors, titian blue, venetian red, alizarin crimson, vermillion, naples yellow, gold ochre, emerald green … pretty bright colors with lovely names.
[Note HF’s preference for lower-casing: titian, venetian, naples rather than the customary Titian, Venetian, Naples.]
The explicit objection is to colors that are both pale (not bright) and earth tones (an earth tone is a warm color — red, yellow, or orange in hue — with a brownish tinge); the examples HF gives are not just bright, but also saturated — colors for which, in my response to HF, I used the term intense (whose opposite is pastel, low in both saturation and brightness).
— AZ > HF: Just reading your roll-call of intense color names gives me a shiver of pleasure. Yes Yes Yes!
Clothing time. The FB discussion also digressed into colors. From Susan Fischer and Hana Filip:
— SF: I look terrible in earth tones; give me strong focal colors every time.
— HF > SF: Me too, washed out, pale, sick. Generally, I find these different shades of pale earth-tones so uninspiring, soporific.
I was going to add my voice at this point, since I look awful — sallow, sickly — in pale earth tones, but I was derailed by SF’s use of focal colors, roughly where I use intense colors. The terms aren’t synonyms, and focal is the wrong descriptor here.
focal vs. intense. Focal colors are those “most exemplary of basic color names in many different languages” (Eleanor Rosch Heider) — color here embracing hue, saturation, and brightness. The focal colors are saturated and bright, but their most relevant property is their hue, so that when people take about “basic color names” and “focal colors” what they’re focusing on is the hues: red, blue, etc.
HF’s preferred colors are saturated (rather than dull) and bright (rather than light, or pale), but not necessarily focal:
ochre — also mustard — is saturated and bright, but too brown to be focal, and so is Venetian red
meanwhile, alizarin crimson lies between focal red and purple (tilting towards the red), and some other intense colors are intermediate between two focal colors and are therefore also non-focal: turquoise, lying between focal blue and green; and magenta, lying between focal red and purple (tilting towards the purple)
Which is why I used intense to refer to colors that are both saturated and bright, rather than focal — using intense roughly as the opposite of pastel, pastel referring to colors that are low in saturation and brightness.
And right now I’m wearing an intense and focal purple t -shirt. A winner on all fronts!