Beige is the French word for the color of natural wool (freshly shorn example at the Royal Winter Fair).
Beige is variously described as a pale sandy fawn color,[1] a grayish tan,[2] a light-grayish yellowish brown, or a pale to grayish yellow.[3] It takes its name from French, where the word originally meant natural wool that has been neither bleached nor dyed, hence also the color of natural wool.[4][5]
The word "beige" has come to be used to describe a variety of light tints chosen for their neutral or pale warm appearance.
Beige began to commonly be used as a term for a color in France beginning approximately 1855–60; the writer Edmond de Goncourt used it in the novel La Fille Elisa in 1877. The first recorded use of beige as a color name in English was in 1887.[6]
Beige is notoriously difficult to produce in traditional offset CMYK printing because of the low levels of inks used on each plate; often it will print in purple or green and vary within a print run.[citation needed]
Beige is also a popular color in clothing, such as for men's trousers, as well as for interior design.
Cream is the color of the cream produced by cattle grazing on natural pasture with plants rich in yellow carotenoid pigments, some of which are incorporated into the cream, to give a yellow tone to white.
The first recorded use of cream as a color name in English was in 1590.[7]
Unbleached silk is one of the Japanese traditional colors in use since beginning in 660 CE in the form of various dyes that are used in designing kimonos.[8][9]
The name of this color in Japanese is shironeri.
Buff is a pale yellow-brown color that got its name from the color of buffed leather.[11]
Buff is the color of fine undyed leathers.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, buff as a descriptor of a color was first used in the London Gazette of 1686, describing a uniform to be "A Red Coat with a Buff-colour'd lining".[12]
The color desert sand may be regarded as a deep shade of beige. It is a pale tint of a color called desert. The color name "desert" was first used in 1920.[13]
A "beige" AT&T telephone.
In the 1960s, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) marketed desert sand–colored telephones for offices and homes. However, they described the color as "beige". It is therefore common for many people to refer to the color desert sand as "beige".
Originally in the 19th century and up to at least 1930, the color ecru meant exactly the same color as beige (i.e. the pale cream color shown above as beige),[14] and the word is often used to refer to such fabrics as silk and linen in their unbleached state. Ecru comes from the French word écru, which means literally "raw" or "unbleached".
Since at least the 1950s, however, the color ecru has been regarded as a different color from beige, presumably in order to allow interior designers a wider palette of colors to choose from.[15]
The first recorded use of mode beige as a color name in English was in 1928.[20]
The normalized color coordinates for mode beige are identical to the color names drab, sand dune, and bistre brown, which were first recorded as color names in English, respectively, in 1686,[21] 1925,[22] and 1930.[23]
Beige is sometimes used as a metaphor for something which is bland, boring, conventional, or even sad. In this sense, it is used in contradistinction to more vibrant and exciting (or more individual) colors.[24]
^Maerz and Paul (1930). A Dictionary of Colour. New York, McGraw-Hill, p. 190; Color Sample of Beige: p. 45 Plate 11 Color Sample C2. The color shown above matches the color sample in the book.
^Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill p. 206; Color Sample of Cream: p. 41 Plate 9 Color Sample D4 The color shown above matches the color sample in the book.
^Nagasaki, Seiki. Nihon no dentoshoku : sono shikimei to shikicho, Seigensha, 2001. ISBN4-916094-53-0
^Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill p. 206; Color Sample of Tuscan: p. 43 Plate 10 Color Sample E5
^Paterson, Ian (2003), A Dictionary of Colour (1st paperback ed.), London: Thorogood (published 2004), p. 73, ISBN1-85418-375-3, OCLC60411025
^"buff, adj.1". Oxford English Dictionary. OUP. Retrieved 21 April 2011.
^Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York: 1930 McGraw-Hill p. 194; Color Sample of Desert: p. 47 Plate 12 Color Sample I7
^Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill p. 149—Discussion of the color Beige (shown in this book's color sample as being the same color that is displayed as "beige" in the Wikipedia color box shown above) notes that beige is exactly the same color as Ecru.
