Imagine you want to paint your kitchen a particular shade of terracotta. You pull up an app, tap through a few swatches, order a tester pot, and it arrives tomorrow. The whole process takes about four minutes. You probably won't even think about it.
That casual abundance of colour is genuinely new. Historically speaking, it's almost shocking. For most of human history, getting a specific colour meant either knowing someone, being someone, or paying an extraordinary amount for the privilege.
When colour was a luxury good
There's a reason paintings from the medieval period tend to look so... brown. It's not that artists lacked ambition. It's that the pigments needed to make anything else were ruinously expensive. Ultramarine blue - made from ground lapis lazuli, mined almost exclusively in what is now Afghanistan - cost more than gold by weight. Artists' contracts from the period apparently specified how much blue could appear in a painting, because patrons were essentially funding the materials rather than just the labour.
Red wasn't much friendlier. The brilliant scarlet known as vermilion came from grinding cinnabar, a mercury-based ore. Carmine required harvesting and drying tens of thousands of cochineal insects. Purple, famously, was made from sea snails. That's why purple became associated with royalty - not symbolism first, scarcity first. The symbolism followed the price tag.
A lot of the colours that feel ordinary now simply didn't exist as paints until relatively recently. Prussian blue - probably the first modern synthetic pigment - wasn't discovered until the early 1700s, apparently by accident in a Berlin workshop. Synthetic ultramarine came in the 1820s. Before then, you made do.
The chemistry that changed everything
The 19th century was, among other things, a colour explosion. Industrial chemistry cracked open the possibility of synthetic dyes and pigments at a pace that would have seemed like alchemy to anyone from the century before. Mauve - discovered in 1856 by an 18-year-old chemist trying to synthesise quinine, of all things - kicked off a race to manufacture colours from coal tar derivatives. Suddenly, purple wasn't scarce. It was cheap enough to put on wallpaper.
And that's typically British, in a way - one of our more significant contributions to the modern world was turning snail-based luxury into affordable wallpaper. We find a way to make everything slightly more practical and slightly less glamorous. Anyway.
By the 20th century, mass production and standardisation turned paint into a commodity. The shift from artisan mixing to factory output meant you could walk into a shop and buy the same colour as your neighbour three counties away. Which is marvellous, really - and also, arguably, a small loss.
What we gave up along the way
When colour had to be mixed by hand from limited ingredients, the person doing the mixing had to understand it. There was no other option. You had to know that this amount of red plus that amount of yellow made a reasonable orange, that adding white lightened a tone but also muted it, that some pigments behaved oddly together and needed managing.
That knowledge was practical and embodied. Painters passed it on to apprentices. Dye-workers kept formulas in ledgers. The colour itself was a result of understanding, not just selection.
We've written before about how colour mixing as a skill has quietly faded from everyday life - and the history here explains some of why. Once you can just buy the colour you want, there's less reason to learn how colours work together. The chemistry is hidden behind a label. The knowledge that used to live in craftspeople's hands moved into factories, then into formulas, then into computers.
Not a tragedy, exactly. But something changed.
Why mixing still scratches an itch that buying doesn't
Here's a thing worth noticing: despite - or maybe because of - living in an era of infinite colour choice, there's been a quiet revival of interest in making colour from scratch. People fermenting their own ink from foraged plants. Watercolourists who grind their own pigments. The occasional slightly obsessive person who refuses to buy orange because they want to understand what making it feels like.
You don't have to go that far. But there's something to the instinct. When you mix colour yourself, even in a simplified or abstract form, you learn something that browsing a swatch chart never teaches you - that colour isn't a fixed thing, it's a relationship. Change one part, everything else shifts.
It's partly why we made Kalabux, our steampunk paint-factory puzzle game. You're routing red, yellow, and blue through a grid of pipework; where streams meet, they mix. Two parts red to one part yellow gives you a different orange than one-to-one. Add a little white and you're tinting; add black and you're shading. The colour theory isn't decoration - it's the puzzle. We found that actually working through those relationships, even in a game, gives you a feel for colour that passively looking at finished results simply doesn't. It's free on Android if you want to give it a go.
The broader point stands regardless. Cheap, abundant colour is a genuine modern miracle that we've completely stopped noticing. The terracotta kitchen took four minutes. The pigment for something similar once took a sea voyage. That's worth a moment's appreciation - even if you then put it off until the weekend because the kitchen looks fine, actually, and is it really worth the hassle?