Code Orange
The other day I stopped by my local grocery store to pick up a few things. On the way inside, I caught my first visual whiff of fall.
It happens every year about this time, despite triple digit temperatures and the reality that sweater weather is months away. The last bags of fertilizer and garden plants had been replaced by a new batch of seasonal offerings—tin pumpkins with Jack O’Lantern faces. They looked absurd.
As a color theorist with a deep interest in holiday rituals, I’m obsessed with the turning of the seasons. Humans have been color coding the calendar for ages. Every season has a signature color palette, with variations that evolve over time and across landscapes.
If you live in North America, you know the color codes for autumn. Especially its signature color. Orange debuts in late August, when brightly colored flip flops and beach balls are 75% off. It gathers steam in September, as we veer toward Thanksgiving, accompanied by earthy harvest browns (orange’s darker sibling) and Halloween’s spooky late night noir. Orange conjures up football tailgate parties, bonfires and autumn leaves, the aromas of sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin Orange is an organic shade of orange with hexadecimal code #FF7518. In the RGB color model, this color is made of 100% red, 45.88% green, and 9.41% blue. In the HSL color space #FF7518 has a hue angle of 24°, 100% saturation, and 55% lightness. Pumpkin Orange has an approximate wavelength of 593.57 nanometers.
By Black Friday, the reign of orange is over. Shelves will be stocked with Rudolf red, pine green, and icicle blue. Everything orange will be 75% off.
In the meantime, I will enjoy the seasonal return of orange—not as a politically fraught emblem of our former president, but as an enduring symbol of the harvest. Two months from now, I’ll buy a real life pumpkin to set on my porch, relish the Harvest Moon, and bake a pumpkin pie.
Yours in color,
Luanne