Grey

• 1. Introduction

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  Grey surrounds us. It is the color of storm clouds gathering overhead, of ash left in a cold hearth, of the lead in an old pipe. Yet only one percent of people, when surveyed, name grey as their favorite color. That number tells a story of its own. Why does a color so present in nature and daily life inspire so little affection? The answers run through medieval monasteries and Renaissance studios, through the uniforms of armies, the racks of men's suits, and the circuits inside every television screen. Grey turns out to carry more history, more science, and more human meaning than its reputation for neutrality might suggest.

• 2. From Old English to Two Spellings

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  The word grey traces back to the Old English grǣġ, a form that connected to the Dutch grauw and the German grau. The Middle English forms were grai or grei, both in common use. Outside the Germanic language family, terms in Spanish, Italian, and Medieval Latin, such as griseus, are considered borrowings from Germanic roots. The color had a name in English as early as 700 CE, making it one of the older recorded color terms in the language. The split between the spellings grey and gray in everyday use developed around the 20th century. Today, grey dominates in European and Commonwealth English, while gray is more common in American English. Both spellings are accepted in both varieties, though web developers have learned one firm exception: HTML and Cascading Style Sheets recognize only the spelling gray, because that convention was inherited from the X11 color list, and Internet Explorer's Trident browser engine does not recognize grey, rendering it green instead.

• 3. Monks, Peasants, and Undyed Wool

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  In the Middle Ages, grey was the color of undyed wool, which placed it firmly in the world of the poor and the humble. Peasants wore it by default, not by choice. Cistercian monks and friars of the Franciscan and Capuchin orders wore it deliberately, as a symbol of their vows of poverty and humility. Franciscan friars in England and Scotland came to be so identified with the color that they were simply called the grey friars, and that name attached itself to numerous places across Great Britain. On the 6th of June, 1861, the Confederate government issued regulations standardizing its army uniform and designating cadet grey as the official color. This was already the color worn by cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point and at the Virginia Military Institute, which had trained many of the Confederacy's officers. The new Confederate uniforms were designed by Nicola Marschall, a German-American artist who also designed the original Confederate flag. He modeled the uniforms closely on contemporary French and Austrian military dress. Grey was not chosen for camouflage; that rationale came later. The South simply lacked a major dye industry, and grey dyes were cheap and easy to produce. Some units had good-quality dyes yielding a solid bluish-grey; others used vegetable dyes from sumac or logwood that faded quickly in sunshine to the yellowish tone of butternut squash.

• 4. Rembrandt's Palette and Grisaille

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  During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, grey moved from the background of everyday life into the foreground of artistic technique. Painters working in the grisaille method built their compositions entirely in grey and white first, then added thin, transparent glazes of color on top. The grey foundation provided the shading, visible through the color layers above; when left uncovered, it gave the impression of carved stone. Rembrandt van Rijn made grey a cornerstone of his practice. His warm greys came from black pigments derived from charcoal or burnt animal bones, mixed with lead white or lime white, and warmed with small amounts of red lake color from cochineal or madder. In a single background passage in his 1661 portrait of Margaretha de Geer, he layered dark brown over orange, red, and yellow earths mixed with ivory black and lead white, then glazed over all of it with a mixture of blue smalt, red ochre, and yellow lake. Art historian Philip Ball described the result as having "an incredible subtlety of pigmentation". El Greco also relied heavily on grey, using it to highlight faces and costumes against the central figures in his compositions. Grey was particularly effective as a background for gold tones and skin tones, a quality both artists understood well.

• 5. The Business Suit and Grisettes

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  By the 18th century, grey had moved decisively into fashionable dress. It looked luminous on silk and satin fabrics worn by the nobility and the wealthy. The grey business suit appeared in the mid-19th century in London, with light grey for summer and dark grey for winter, displacing the more colorful men's clothing that had preceded it. Women working in the factories and workshops of Paris in the 19th century also wore grey as a matter of necessity, which gave them the collective name grisettes, from gris, the French word for grey. The word gris also carried a secondary meaning: drunk. The same name grisette was applied to a lower class of Parisian prostitutes, attaching social complexity to a simple color. After World War II, the grey suit became a cultural symbol of conformity and uniformity of thought, a reading that the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit made explicit. That book became a successful film in 1956. In the 1930s, the English drape suit style featured wide shoulders and a nipped waist, usually in dark or light grey. After the war, the cut shifted to a slimmer continental fit, but the color stayed grey. In gay slang, a grey queen refers to a gay person working in financial services, a term that originated in the 1950s when grey flannel suits were closely associated with that profession.

• 6. Why Storm Clouds Are Dark

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  Small summer clouds look white because sunlight scatters off the tiny water droplets inside them and reaches the viewer as white light. As clouds grow larger and thicker, white light can no longer penetrate through; it reflects off the top instead. The clouds look darkest grey during thunderstorms, when they can reach heights of between 20,000 and 30,000 feet. Stratiform clouds, which spread across the entire sky in a layer, range from a few hundred to a few thousand feet thick. The thicker they are, the less sunlight passes through them to the ground below. From above, seen from an airplane, the same stratiform clouds look perfectly white; from the ground, the sky appears grey and overcast. Grey hair follows a different kind of logic. Melanin, produced by specialized cells called melanocytes in each hair follicle, gives hair its color. Two types of pigment exist: dark eumelanin and light phaeomelanin. At a certain age, which varies from person to person, the melanocytes begin injecting less melanin into the growing hair cells and eventually stop entirely. In February 2005, a team of Harvard scientists proposed in the journal Science that this decline results from the failure of melanocyte stem cells to maintain pigment production, due to age or genetic factors. For some people, the change begins in their twenties. A figure from Scientific American holds that, generally speaking, 50 percent of Caucasians are 50 percent grey by age 50.

• 7. Grey in Optics and on Screen

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  Artists traditionally mixed grey from black and white, adding small amounts of red for warmth or blue for coolness. Mixing two complementary colors, such as orange and azure, also produces grey. On modern televisions, computer displays, and telephones, grey is generated through the RGB color model: red, green, and blue light at full intensity produce white; lowering all three intensities equally produces the various shades of grey. In the RGB model, any color where red, green, and blue values are equal qualifies as grey. In printing, the CMYK model achieves grey by using black ink at a lower density than full black, or by mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow in specific proportions at low to moderate densities. HTML and CSS offer several named grey tones, while 254 distinct true greys are available through hex triplet specification. An anomaly persists in the web color system: the named color gray is actually much darker than the color named darkgray, a conflict that arose between the original HTML grey and the X11 grey, which corresponds more closely to HTML's silver. The three slategray colors are not on the true greyscale at all; they carry a slight saturation toward cyan. Claude Debussy, responding to Whistler's arrangement of grey tones in painting, wrote to violinist Eugene Ysaye in 1894 describing his Nocturnes as "an experiment in the combinations that can be obtained from one colour - what a study in grey would be in painting".

• 8. What Grey Means Now

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  Surveys in Europe and North America consistently associate grey with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and humility. Thirteen percent of European men named it their least favorite color. One author described it as "too weak to be considered masculine, but too menacing to be considered a feminine color. It is neither warm nor cold, neither material or spiritual. With grey, nothing seems to be decided." That undecidedness made it politically unattractive: grey is rarely chosen as the color of a political party, largely because of its association with boredom and indecision. The German Grey Panthers stand as a rare exception. The term grey power describes the electoral influence of older voters as a bloc, while the term greys is used by some environmentalists as a pejorative for those who oppose environmental measures. Grey is also the color of ashes in Christian tradition, carrying biblical associations with mourning and repentance. Buddhist monks and priests in Japan and Korea often wear grey outer robes; Taoist priests in China do as well. In sports, baseball road uniforms are traditionally grey, a custom that developed because away teams in the 19th and early 20th centuries had no access to laundry facilities on the road, and grey concealed stains better than white. The New York Times, known for its long history and standing in American journalism, carries the nickname The Grey Lady, a term that ties all of grey's associations, age, sobriety, authority, and a certain lack of color, into a single recognizable image.