The Palette/green/Ground from a rock or crystal

Malachite

The green half of the same rock that gives azurite, ground from a banded stone and used as eye paint before it was ever used as paint.

Also called mountain green · shi lü · Hungarian green

Hex: #45886A
RGB: 69, 136, 106
First used: c.4000 BC in Egypt
From: Copper deposits: Sinai, the Urals, Congo, China

What it is

Basic copper carbonate, Cu₂CO₃(OH)₂. Azurite is the same elements in a different proportion, which is why they grow together.

How it is made

Sorted from copper ore, crushed, washed and graded by particle size. Like azurite it loses colour as it is ground fine (a coarse grind is a deep green and a fine one is a pale wash) so the grinding step is a deliberate choice about which colour you want rather than a preparation step.

Egyptian practice ground it for cosmetics as much as for painting. Green eye paint predates green wall paint, and the malachite in a cosmetic palette from a tomb is the same material as the malachite on the wall behind it.

Malachite, Mineral variety of copper carbonate. Wikipedia's description, not ours.

The history

It is the standard green of the ancient and medieval world across an enormous geographical range: Egyptian tomb painting, Chinese landscape painting where it is one half of the blue-green 'qinglü' tradition with azurite, Japanese work, Persian and Indian manuscripts, and European panel painting through the Middle Ages.

Its weakness is that it is a copper carbonate, so acid destroys it and heat turns it black. It is also relatively weak in tinting strength, so it was often used thickly and flatly rather than mixed, which is part of why medieval and Chinese greens look the way they do, laid in as a field rather than blended into a modelled form.

Modern 'malachite green' is a completely different thing: a synthetic aniline dye used as a biological stain and a fish-tank fungicide, unrelated to the mineral and not even the same colour. The name collision causes constant confusion, including in supposedly authoritative sources.

Where it is used

Egyptian cosmetics and painting, Chinese blue-green landscape painting, illumination, panel painting, and ornamental stone, polished malachite is a decorative material in its own right and the Russian imperial workshops made entire rooms of it.

The Chinese blue-green tradition is the thing to study here. Azurite and malachite, from the same deposits, used together in flat graded fields, produced a landscape convention that lasted over a thousand years and is still instantly recognisable. A whole visual language built on which two minerals were available. That is what a material constraint does when a culture accepts it instead of fighting it.

Go and look at it

The Malachite Room
Winter Palace, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Columns and urns of the polished stone itself. Two tonnes of the mineral this pigment is ground from.
Tang and Song blue-green landscapes
Palace Museum, Beijing; National Palace Museum, Taipei
Malachite and azurite in flat fields. A thousand-year convention built on two minerals from one ore body.

How it behaves

Made of: Basic copper carbonate, Cu₂CO₃(OH)₂. Azurite is the same elements in a different proportion, which is why they grow together.
Opacity: Opaque. It covers what is under it.
Lightfastness: Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.

Hazard

A copper compound; the dust should not be breathed, though it is mild by the standards of this family.

Destroyed by acid and blackened by heat.
Loses saturation as it is ground finer, the grind chooses the colour.
Not related to the synthetic dye that shares its name.

The numbers

All derived from the hex, never typed beside it

HEX: #45886A; What a browser and a design file want.
RGB: 69, 136, 106; The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
HSL: 153°, 33%, 40%; Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
CMYK: 49, 0, 22, 47; Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
LAB: 52, -29, 10; Perceptual. L* of 52 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.

This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Malachite is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.

Where it sits on the wheel

Hue 153°

Its opposite, by the diagram

#45886A

#884563

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

#45886A

#619A80

#7DAC97

#A2C4B5

#C7DBD2

#E3EDE9

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

#45886A

#3B745A

#305F4A

#234435

#152920

#0A1410

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
4.21:1 · Large text only

Handgloves

Black on it
4.98:1 · AA

Handgloves

It on paper
4.00:1 · Large text only

Handgloves

It on ink
4.34:1 · Large text only

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.