The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

Overview

One of USA Today's “100 Books to Read While Stuck at Home During the Coronavirus Crisis” 

A dazzling gift, the unforgettable, unknown history of colors and the vivid stories behind them in a beautiful multi-colored volume.

“Beautifully written . . . Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers.” —NPR, Best Books of 2017

The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of seventy-five fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.

In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh’s chrome yellow sunflowers or punk’s fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

“This passionate and majestic compedium will leave you bathed in the gorgeous optics of light.” —Elle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143131144
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/24/2017
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	41,043
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kassia St. Clair is a freelance journalist and author based in London. She graduated from Bristol University with a first-class honors degree in history in 2007 and went on to do a master’s degree at Oxford. There she wrote her dissertation on women’s masquerade costumes during the eighteenth century and graduated with distinction. She has since written about design and culture for publications including The Economist, House & Garden, Quartz, and the New Statesman. She has had a column about color in Elle Decoration since 2013 and is a former assistant books and arts editor for The Economist.

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2017
London-based writer St. Clair delivers a mix of science, humor, and art history in this collection of bite-size essays on the cultural and social lore of colors based on her column in British Elle Decoration. The author arranges her color commentary in blocks: color entries start with white and end with black; in between, St. Clair tells the stories of colors unglamorous (umber) and obscure (gamboge) with those that kill (orpiment pigment is around 60% arsenic) or change (verdigris is the green patina that results when copper is exposed to air). She explores etymologies (buff from buffalo) and sprinkles wit (taupe, French for mole, is “browner than a mole had a right to be”) throughout the collection. Her sentences guarantee sustained reading: “Balthasar Gérard was the Lee Harvey Oswald of his day”; the word heliotrope fills “the mouth like a rich, buttery sauce.” St. Clair’s rhetoric beautifies the form of the brief essay. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written and thoughtfully produced . . . Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers.”
—Nina Martyris, NPR’s Best Books of 2017

“If you adore color, you’ll love The Secret Lives of Color. This passionate and majestic compedium . . . will leave you bathed in the gorgeous optics of light.”
—Elle

“A kaleidoscope of charming, discursive essays . . . A light and lively guide [that] offers plenty of fresh clues for the brain’s colorful calculations.”
—The Economist

“Fascinating.”
—BuzzFeed

“Gorgeous.”
—The Guardian

“The history of colors, it turns out, is the story of science as well as art. Kassia St. Clair’s entertaining book brings them both into vivid relief.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair presents readers with [an] opportunity to relish in otherwise mundane aspects of reality. . . . An engaging mix of aesthetic analysis and optical science, it could make anyone a keen observer of our kaleidoscopic world.”
—Popular Science

“Riveting . . . diligently researched . . . Whatever your opinion of a shade, The Secret Lives of Color provides some illuminating perspectives on it.”
—Hyperallergic

“A mind-expanding tour of the world without leaving your paintbox. Every color has a story, and here are some of the most alluring, alarming, and thought-provoking.”
—Simon Garfield, New York Times bestselling author of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“St. Clair delivers a mix of science, humor, and art history in this collection of bite-sized essays on the cultural and social lore of colors. . . . Her sentences guarantee sustained reading. . . . [Her] rhetoric beautifies the form of the brief essay.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The Secret Lives of Color holds surprise and satisfaction at every striation of the rainbow.” 
—Booklist

“Brimming with facts, historical insights and curious tales.”
—Elle Decoration

“Weirdly fascinating.”
—Wired

“Charming.”
—The Financial Times

“Fascinating insights . . . a lexicon of colors, simultaneously revealing the cultural attitudes that determine our responses to them.”
—Country Living

“What The Secret Lives of Color offers really is, in some sense, a flash portrait of human civilization, a zigzagging and unpredictable exploration of how significantly color has shaped histories and disciplines, fueled empires, changed the nature of war and caused species to flourish or face extinction.”
—Chemistry World 

“A must for anyone interested in color [or] decorating, but also language, culture and art.”
—The Chromologist

“A work of art in its own right, The Secret Lives Of Color is a beautiful tactile book.”
—The Pool

“St. Clair serves up a chromatic buffet.”
—Nature

From the Publisher