Odd Ordered Pigments Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sepia

Auburn is a reddish brown, burnt umber is a yellowish brown, and chocolate is a sweet and yummy brown. So this is a brown family, and sepia fits as a reddish, rich brown. The word comes from the color of the ink of the cuttlefish Sepia. (I was going to go off on a tangent about the shell of the cuttlefish and how pet birds get minerals from it, but really that has nothing to do with colors so I won't. Move on. Nothing exciting here.)

Answer: Chartreuse

This was a challenge! You probably knew of Kelly green and lime green as colors. So this is a family of green pigments. Now the trick is to accept that "Harlequin" is also a green - in fact, it's a bright green - and also to know that "Chartreuse" is a green. It is very close to harlequin green on the color wheel.

Answer: Cream

Have you ever had to go buy paint to touch up a wall that was white? If you go into a paint store and ask for white paint, you will learn that there are many, many white paints, and if you buy the wrong tint, you will see the different colors when you paint parts of your "white" wall. Ecru, ivory and linen are all common paint colors and they are all "off-white" to my eye. "Cream" is a warm white tone also, to complete our off-white family.

Answer: Cobalt

Ah! Now we come to a family that is part of the "blues". But you also may notice another set of "blues" in another question that contains "denim" and "navy". The placement of the color is important, and you will notice that each color sequence is alphabetical! So "Cobalt" fits here. Aqua is a bright green-tinged blue, cyan is a greenish-blue blue, and sapphire is deep true blue. All of these colors contain some blue. Cobalt blue is obtained from cobalt oxide, and that is as far as my non-chemist brain can explain. To go further would require me to use words like "sintering" which sounds like "whimpering" and that is what happens when I try. So I won't.

Answer: Pine

Forest green is a dark, rich green. Mint is a light green, and olive is ... well, the color of an olive, which is a green with brown tones. Pine fits, as it also is the color of a pine tree, which is green. Notice that we have another family of greens in a question, but again we see that lists are alphabetical. "Pine" is the only green that fits alphabetically here. You try to put "chartreuse" here, and the whole tree/plant list would just be embarrassed by that flamboyant and undisciplined green.

Answer: Plum

This is a purple family. I must confess that I love the word "Puce". It's a horrible word that does not look like the nice sedate brownish-purple that is the color "puce". Plum is a deep purple, the color of plums; violet is a light to medium purple, the color of violets; and purple is its usual generic red/blue mix.

Answer: Fuchsia

These are all pinks of the virulent, in-your-face, shouted "PINK" variety. Flamingo pink is the color of the bright pink, long-legged bird. Frankly, magenta and hot pink look about the same to me, give or take the deepness of the tone. Either way, add fuchsia to the mix (and be happy you do not have to spell it), and you have four very pink, very aggressive tones.

Answer: Black

I so wanted to slip in "Stygian" in the black family, but I could only find it listed as a synonym to "jet-black" and I could not find it in any color list. So fair is fair! No stygian. This list is not fair in the "fair in tone, fair of face" sense (nice segue, eh?) as all are shades of black. Alphabetically, we place "Black" in front, to make our dark list complete.

Answer: Smalt

This is another set of blues. All of these are vivid dark-colored blues. I know you might say "What in the tarnation is 'smalt'? It looks like an ice-cream drink!" According to Oxford University Press dictionary, it is a blue pigment made from crushed glass with a cobalt-oxide color. (Contrast with "S'malt" which is what you say when presented with a chocolate malted drink, which has nothing at all to do with the blues.)

Answer: Mustard

These are all yellows. In fact, They are all words of plants that produce yellow in some way: an ear of corn, a dandelion flower, a lemon fruit and the seed of the mustard tree from whence we get our yellow mustard. (I have always wanted to use the word "whence" in writing. Thank you for allowing it.) By the way, apparently you can make home-made mustard with a 1/2 cup of mustard seed and about 3 days more than I intend to ever use making any food.

This information I found from my color research.