A Taste of Orange

Today we are "Tasting Orange". The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

What is the newest color? We may not think of a color as having an “age” but some colors go back to Neolithic times. Why would such a brilliant color as orange go unnoticed? Perhaps it had to do with a name. The word “orange” comes to us from Middle English, by way of Portuguese, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. Curiously, there is no word for the color “orange” in Chinese, despite China being the region of origin of the colorful fruit. The evolution of the word, and its link to the fruit, traces its migration from East to the West through the centuries.

The sweet orange (Citrus Sinensis) finally reached Europe in the Sixteenth Century. The popularity of the orange from its juice, fruit, peel and zest, to its oil used for medicines and perfumes was unparalleled. Orangeries, greenhouses capable of sustaining the fruit trees in the European climate, became required ornaments of aristocrats, and the orange especially prized by the masses. Its name and its color became synonymous.

In history though, the color orange has long been employed, usually seen as Yellow or Red traditionally. The ancient Egyptians used the color to depict healthy skin tones of living people. In Roman Pompeii the orange pigments orpiment and realgar, arsenic based, were used in vivid murals.
In India the color has sacred overtones and is linked to flowers, orange carnelians and spices. In the East it is often the color of monks’ robes, dyed with saffron or turmeric. Many popular vegetables are orange due to the presence of carotenes.

The influential French royal house of Orange-Nassau, adopted the color into its heraldry in the 1570s and it later came to be associated with Protestantism. The flags of Ireland, the Netherlands, and New York City bear a stripe of the color orange, commemorating this long history.

The synthesis of the pigment Chrome Orange, by French chemist Louis Vacquelin in 1797, provided the Impressionists with one of their most esteemed colors. Vincent Van Gogh wrote enthusiastically to his brother Theo about the color, paired with its complement, azure blue. Renoir, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec also used orange to great effect.

During WW II, High-Visibility Orange was developed by the US military and used for floatation vests, allowing downed Navy pilots to quickly be located at sea. Now Hi-Vis orange is ubiquitous in safety gear for highway and construction workers, astronauts, first responders, firefighters, and even penitentiary inmates.

In the 1960s fluorescent pigments that glowed when exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet lights, invented by Robert and Joseph Switzer, were marketed under the name “Day-Glo” colors. Fluorescent orange was frequently used in the new “psychedelic” posters of the time, and is still highly popular today.

Now that you know about the value of orange, aren’t you glad you asked?

I'm Celeste Williams for the University of Houston where we are interested in the way inventive minds work.

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Sources
Pastoureau, Michel, Yellow, The History of a Color, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton, NJ, 2020.

St. Clair, Kassia, The Secret Lives of Color, Penguin Random House, New York, New York, 2016

Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/orange

This Episode first aired February 4, 2026.