Learn about what colors mix together to create purple. Read about the history of the color purple and learn about why purple is considered a royal color. Updated: 03/29/2023
Branding, Color Psychology
Let’s look at the psychology of the color purple and what it designing with purple can mean for your business.
Understanding color and its impact is essential to making smart color decisions, bridging the gap between what you are trying to communicate and what is actually perceived. We’ve explored this reality with a handful of colors—blue, red, green, yellow, black, and white. Let’s now look at the psychology of the color purple and what it designing with purple can mean for your business.
Purple Has To Make Up Its Mind
Purple is one of the three secondary colors. Like a combo of red and blue, it is neither warm nor cool. At the same time, it is simultaneously warm and cool. Purple embodies the balance of red’s stimulation and blue’s calm. This mix can cause unrest or uneasiness unless the undertone is clearly defined, at which point the purple takes on the characteristics of its undertone. For example, a blue-purple becomes visually cool, while a red-purple is visually warm. With a sense of mystic and royal qualities, purple is a color often well-liked by very creative or eccentric types and is the favorite color of adolescent girls.
- Royalty. A universal connection that people make with purple is its association with royalty, nobility, and prestige. Purple was the royal color of the Caesars. In ancient times, the color purple in stained glass was seen as uniting the “wisdom” of blue and the “love” of red, therefore symbolizing justice and royalty. It’s symbolic of wealth and status in Japan.
- Value. These notions of royalty cause purple to communicate a sense of value. For this reason, the highest-value poker chip ($5,000) is purple.
- Sacredness. Purple is also considered sacred, especially in the natural world. In Egypt, purple is symbolic of virtue and faith. In Tibet, the purple stone, amethyst, is considered to be sacred to Buddha. In Christianity, purple is associated with Advent and Lent.
- Bravery. Purple is symbolic of bravery. The purple in the U.S. military Purple Heart award represents courage. The Purple Heart is awarded to members of the United States armed forces who have been wounded in action.
Brands That Use Purple
There are very few brands that have chosen to design with purple for their logo identity. “Why?” you may ask. Although royalty and value can be seen as positive associations, they also have negative connotations, and can often communicate in an arrogant way. Another reason is that on the color spectrum, purple lies at the very shortest frequency of wavelengths visible to the human eye. In other words, it can be a difficult color to work with.
- Yahoo! This could perhaps be the most famous purple brand. Offering email, news, and a search engine, among other things, Yahoo! chose purple to communicate the value of the information they can provide on the web.
- Crown Royal. The name says it all. This Canadian whiskey brand was first introduced as a tribute to King George VI’s visit to Canada in 1939.
- Monster.com. Monster is primarily used to help those seeking work to find job openings that match their skills and location. Their use of purple relates to any age, culture, or gender.
- LA Lakers. With yellow as its complementary color, purple creates a bold, high-frequency palette. The LA Lakers’ color scheme is just one example of this energetic combination.
The Color Purple
Since the origins of human culture, colors have represented an important way for people to decorate and attribute meaning or symbolism to different objects and ideas. For example, one popular color used to symbolize different emotions and concepts is purple. Although purple is a relatively rare color in nature, there are many purple things in popular culture, such as fabrics, paints, dyes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Pansies, for example, are a type of annual flower that can be bred to produce purple petal colors. Some varieties of grapes and eggplants also come in various shades of purple.
What colors make purple? The color wheel is an artistic and scientific tool for visualizing the relationship between different colors. The three primary colors forming the basis for the color wheel are red, blue, and yellow. Purple is one of the secondary colors created by the mixture of red and blue hues. Although people sometimes confuse the colors purple and violet with one another, there are several important differences between purple and violet. For instance, purple is typically formed by an equal mixture of red and blue colors, while violet usually contains a higher concentration of blue.
Purple versus Violet
Violet, another color intermediate between red and blue, is sometimes confused with purple. However, artists and scientists have identified several important differences between these two similar colors. For example, violet represents an example of a natural color that can be found in nature. In addition, violet is one of the colors visible to the human eye on the electromagnetic spectrum, with a wavelength of 380 to 450 nm. Furthermore, violet consists of only a single shade unless formed through artificial processes.
Purple, by contrast, is not a natural color, as it is typically created artificially by the mixture of two primary, or natural, colors. Furthermore, there are relatively few objects found in nature that possess a natural purple hue. This is because purple does not represent one of the colors visible on the electromagnetic spectrum. And because it is artificially produced through the mixture of different pigments and dyes, artists recognize a variety of shades as purple.
A color tile showing different values of the purple color.
A color tile showing the various hues of violet.
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What Does Purple Represent?
Humans have ascribed various meanings to many popular colors, such as red with love and yellow with happiness. So what does purple represent in different cultures? In many European cultures, shades of purple have been associated with the royal colors of kings, queens, princes, and princesses. Because of this association, people sometimes see purple as representing royalty, luxury, power, and authority. In some Asian cultures, people associate purple with spirituality and mysticism. Some of these meanings are derived from the history of purple dye production.
The History of Purple
The creation of purple dye has its roots in early human history. Beginning in the 16th century B.C.E., the Phoenician culture of the Mediterranean Sea first started producing purple dye, known as Tyrian purple, in the city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon. The Phoenicians used the mucus of the murex sea snail, a type of predatory gastropod easily identified by the many spiny processes that adorn the shell.
Because thousands of murex sea snails were needed to produce only a small quantity of purple dye, this color represented one of the hardest to produce by the artisans of the ancient Mediterranean. After harvesting thousands of sea snails, the Phoenician artisans removed the mucus glands and heated them for ten days in a container containing brine. This process turned the glands and their secretions into a purple color that could be used to dye tiles, paints, and textiles.
Due to the costly process needed to manufacture purple dye, the purple textiles made from these pigments were extremely rare and became associated with wealth and royalty. During the Roman Empire, for example, the elite ruling class prohibited commoners from wearing clothing made from purple textiles. This monopolization and control of purple textiles continued with the rise of the Catholic Church and the royal families of Europe. For example, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne was buried in a shroud made from Tyrian purple and gold threads woven to depict a horse-drawn chariot.
The shroud of Charlemagne made from Tyrian purple and gold threads.
During the mid-19th century, chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally created an artificial purple dye while attempting to form synthetic quinine, a standard treatment for malaria. This allowed people to purchase purple textiles and clothing at a significantly lower cost when compared to the cloths created using Tyrian purple dye. By the 20th century, purple became associated with the counterculture movement of the late 20th century. Jimi Hendrix’s song “Purple Haze,” for example, and Prince’s concept album Purple Rain both represent examples of popular music produced as part of this counterculture movement.
Purple in Christianity
The Old Testament and the New Testament used by practicing Christians describe the color purple as associated with wealth and royalty. The New Testament describes how the Roman soldiers torturing Jesus during his crucifixion covered him in a purple robe to humiliate him as the “King of the Jews.” Because of the physical and emotional pain endured by Jesus during his crucifixion, purple became associated with Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. For this reason, many Christian churches use purple during the Lenten and Easter/Pascha seasons to remind parishioners of Christ’s sacrifice, his resurrection, and the need for worshippers to atone for their sins.
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Lesson Summary
Purple is a popular color steeped in a rich tradition of cultural, religious, and historical symbolism. Formed by the mixture of the two primary colors red and blue, purple is an example of a synthetic color rarely found in nature. By contrast, natural colors are found in nature and include violet, often confused with purple. However, there are several important differences between purple and violet. Purple, for example, is not a visible color on the electromagnetic spectrum, while violet represents a natural color with wavelengths of between 380 to 450 nm on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Manufactured purple dye was first produced in the Phoenician city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon. Known as Tyrian purple, this dye was formed by heating the mucus glands of the murex sea snail. The high costs associated with the production of Tyrian purple dye resulted in restricting purple textiles to the elite ruling classes of the ancient Roman Empire. Moreover, because of the rarity of this hue, the color purple became associated with wealth, royalty, power, luxury, mysticism, and spirituality in many different cultures. However, by the mid-19th century, the discovery of a synthetic purple dye by chemist William Henry Perkin led to the spread of purple textiles to many people outside of the wealthy and ruling elite.
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The Color Purple — In Physics
You may have heard of the book The Color Purple by Alice Walker, but what does the mixture between red and blue mean for your eyes?
Purple has been used by millions of individuals, ranging from Roman magistrates and high-priced Phoenician purple dye. It was first introduced in the Neolithic era, in which it was used by French Pech Merle artists, and later the Tyrian people in the 15th century BC. It was later passed to China through the purple gromwell plant, then the Byzantine Empire, and then was propagated throughout the Renaissance period and to centuries beyond, finally making its way into our century through years of use, interpretation, and association, and made its way to becoming the 11th most popular color in America, and was named the color of the year for two years in a row by Pantone. It is now seen in dyes, clothing, plants, lightning, graphic design, user interfaces, product packaging and more.
The color purple is associated with thousands of things: the book, wealth, royalty, extravagance, magic, pride, independence, the mattress company, regality, and grandeur, among other descriptive adjectives, but it takes on a whole new meaning from a physics standpoint.
Purple is commonly known as the color produced when red and blue are mixed. This is true, but not holistically. Purple, not to be confused with violet, is actually a large range of colors represented by the different hues created when red, blue, or violet light mix. Purple is a color mixture, whereas violet is a spectral color, meaning it consists of a single wavelength of light. In fact, purple doesn’t have its own explicit wavelength, making it unique in observation. Due to this, purple is not the principle color of magenta, crimson, or indigo, either, though they are perceptually very similar to one another. On the CIE Chromaticity Diagram (the image above), there is a given purple boundary, which is a line of purples located between spectral red and violet colors that are seen on the graph. But then here lies an important question:
Why do I see purple instead of violet or indigo or even magenta?
The answer is simple: it is purple. Just kidding. It’s not that simple. In fact, you’re not seeing purple at all, according to our current physics. Purple as a color doesn’t necessarily even exist, kind of like magenta, due to it not having a static wavelength. So even though we only see red, green, and blue, when we look at any color on the same spectrum of blue, pink, and violet, there is a large range of wavelengths that reach our eyes during the same concurrent moment as we’re looking at an object. Due to the conic nature of our retina, we process an extremely large amalgamation of light reflections, the ratio of which is to be seen as a perfect spectral color. So, in reality, you are seeing violet; red and blue with a little more blue, whereas when you see purple, it’s more of a red and blue 1:1 situation. In reality, purple, being a perfect fraction of a color, resembles so many other colors, and because it is so mundane, our brains have recognized other colors to be shades of it, even spectral and primary ones!
So what does this all mean?
Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this means virtually nothing in your daily life. Perhaps you’ll be more considerate to violet or magenta when you see them, but I don’t think it will cause you to win the lottery or ace your exam (article on that coming soon). However, if you’re looking to work with spectroscopy, optical physics, or even with using samples in genetics or programming materials, understanding light interactions, visual perception, and photoluminescence will be quite important. Anyway, if you see violet around make sure to not say: “Hey! You look like purple!”
My name is Okezue Bell ’23, and I’m a 14 y/o innovator/entrepreneur in the quantum computing and AI spaces. I’m also currently making developments in foodtech and cellular agriculture, as well as biocomputing!
You can read Okezue’s work on Medium here.
