The Palette/pink/Made in a lab or a works
Magenta
A colour that does not exist in the spectrum. Your brain makes it up when red and blue arrive together and no green does.
Also called fuchsine · aniline red · process magenta
- Hex
- #FF00FF
- RGB
- 255, 0, 255
- First used
- 1859
- From
- Lyon, and named after a battle in Lombardy
What it is
Originally fuchsine, an aniline dye. In printing, process magenta is usually a quinacridone (PR122) or rhodamine.
How it is made
Fuchsine came two years after mauveine, from the same coal-tar chemistry, patented in 1859 by François-Emmanuel Verguin in Lyon. It was named magenta after the Battle of Magenta that year, which is a piece of marketing worth admiring: a dye named for a current news event.
Modern process magenta is a different animal: quinacridone pigments, developed by DuPont in the 1950s, which are extraordinarily lightfast for organic compounds and are the reason a printed magenta no longer fades to orange.
Magenta, Color. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Magenta is the best available proof that colour is something your visual system does rather than something light has. There is no wavelength of magenta. Spectral colours run red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and nowhere in that line is there a pink. When your long-wavelength and short-wavelength cones both fire and the middle ones stay quiet, the brain has no wavelength to report, so it invents a colour to fill the gap and closes the spectrum into a circle. Magenta is the join.
Which makes it strange that it is one of the four inks the printed world runs on. Its selection as a process primary was a practical decision about what four inks can reach between them, made in the early twentieth century as colour lithography industrialised, and it is why the CMYK gamut has the shape it has.
It also has the clearest modern brand history of any colour. T-Mobile fought and largely won a series of European actions over magenta in telecommunications, and has sent lawyers after everyone from insurers to a small technology blog. You cannot own a colour, but you can own the use of a colour within a category, and magenta is the case law.
Where it is used
Process printing, screen display, and an enormous amount of signage, because it is the most aggressive colour available that still reads as friendly rather than as a warning. Fluorescent versions are used where something has to be found fast.
It is the colour most likely to break a print job. A saturated on-screen magenta is well outside CMYK, so a design that leans on it looks electric on a laptop and muddy-pink on a press. If magenta is load-bearing in your identity, specify a spot ink and stop asking four-colour process to reach something it cannot.
Go and look at it
A four-colour print separation
Any printer's proof
Look at the magenta plate alone: most of the flesh tone and all of the warmth of the image is in it.
T-Mobile's trademark filings
EUIPO and national registers
The most-litigated colour in modern branding. Worth reading if you plan to build on a single hue.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Originally fuchsine, an aniline dye. In printing, process magenta is usually a quinacridone (PR122) or rhodamine.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Good. Safe for anything that is not hung in direct sun for a century.
- No wavelength corresponds to it. It is a perceptual construction, not a spectral colour.
- Screen magenta sits outside CMYK, expect a shift in print unless you buy a spot ink.
- Early fuchsine was fugitive and contained arsenic; modern quinacridones are neither.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #FF00FF
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 255, 0, 255
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 300°, 100%, 50%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 100, 0, 0
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 60, 98, -61
- Perceptual. L* of 60 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 300°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
3.14:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
Black on it
6.70:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on paper
2.98:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on ink
5.83:1 · AA
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
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