The Palette/yellow/Grown
Saffron
The most expensive substance on earth by weight, and it takes about a hundred and fifty thousand flowers to make a kilogram.
Also called kesar · zafaran · crocus yellow
- Hex
- #F4C430
- RGB
- 244, 196, 48
- First used
- Bronze Age, painted at Knossos and Akrotiri
- From
- Kashmir, Iran, Greece, and later Spain and Italy
What it is
Crocin, a carotenoid, from the dried stigmas of Crocus sativus.
How it is made
Each flower has three red stigmas. They are picked by hand, at dawn, in a season a few weeks long, and dried. A kilogram of dried saffron needs somewhere around 150,000 flowers and about forty hours of picking. Nothing has ever mechanised it, because a machine cannot get three threads out of a crocus without destroying them.
As a colourant it is used as an infusion (steeped in warm water or milk) rather than as a ground pigment. It dyes and it tints, and it is also a flavour and a scent at the same time, which very few colourants are.
The history
Saffron is painted at Akrotiri on Santorini and at Knossos on Crete, in frescoes showing the harvest, which makes it one of the earliest documented agricultural specialisms. It runs through Persian, Indian, Greek, Roman and medieval European use continuously, always at a high price.
It has been a colour of religion and rank repeatedly and independently: Hindu and Buddhist saffron, the Irish léine, Roman wedding veils, and the saffron in the Indian flag. Along with that comes a long history of adulteration, safflower, turmeric and marigold sold as saffron is a fraud with a documented record going back to the Middle Ages, and medieval Nuremberg burned people for it.
In manuscript work it was used as a yellow glaze, and often over silver or tin leaf to imitate gold, which is the same economy gamboge served. It was also used to tint paper and vellum.
Where it is used
Dyeing, illumination, food, medicine, perfume, and religious use across several unconnected traditions. As a pigment it is minor; as a cultural colour it is enormous.
It is the clearest example in this whole library of a colour whose meaning is welded to its cost. Saffron reads as sanctity and as luxury in cultures that never met, and in every case the reason is the same: everybody involved knew what it cost. That is the mechanism behind almost every 'premium' colour convention, and it is worth being honest that the mechanism no longer operates. Nothing on a screen costs anything.
Go and look at it
The Saffron Gatherers fresco
Akrotiri, Santorini, and the Museum of Prehistoric Thera
Bronze Age women harvesting crocus. A picture of the supply chain, painted 3,600 years ago.
Kashmiri saffron fields at harvest
Pampore, Jammu and Kashmir, India
Three weeks a year, picked by hand before the sun gets up.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Crocin, a carotenoid, from the dried stigmas of Crocus sativus.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Fugitive. It leaves. Work made with it is already less than it was.
- Fades quickly in light. Saffron-dyed textiles are all paler than they were.
- Water-soluble, so it stains rather than covers.
- Historically the most adulterated substance in the spice trade.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #F4C430
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 244, 196, 48
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 45°, 90%, 57%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 20, 80, 4
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 81, 4, 74
- Perceptual. L* of 81 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Saffron 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 45°
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
1.64:1 · Fails
Handgloves
Black on it
12.79:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on paper
1.56:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on ink
11.13:1 · AAA
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.