The Color Fuchsia Isn’t Real
What I found when I went looking for a particular shade of pink
Up until very recently, I had never questioned my perception of fuchsia, the bright, hot, pinkish-reddish-purpleish color present in nail polish, Barbie swimsuits, and certain flowers. And then one (very unsettling) day, I realized that my understanding of fuchsia is not the same as Pantone’s. Or Crayola’s, or Revlon’s, or even the major paint companies. This threw me for a loop. After all, I have two art degrees and a lifelong obsession with color theory. I get my eyes checked once a year. How could I be wrong about a shade of pink?
The more I poked around, the stranger the story got. It is a doomed quest, trying to track down this color. Because nobody can agree on what fuchsia looks like, exactly, or if it’s a real color at all.
The story begins with Leonhardt Fuchs himself. Born in 1501 in what is now Bavaria, he was a doctor and professor of medicine, as well as a scholar of medicinal plants — many of which he grew himself at the University of Tübingen’s botanical garden in Baden-Württemberg. His life’s work was ‘Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants’, an encyclopedia of medicinal plants ranging from henbane to cannabis, each with a detailed and colorful woodcut illustration showing the plant’s seeds, flower, roots, and leaves.
Although Fuchs speculated on foreign plants, and included a few derived from descriptions by explorers, the vast majority of the 500 plants described and illustrated in ‘Notable Commentaries’ are native to Europe. Leonhardt Fuchs never saw a fuchsia, and he never had to describe that particular color to the printers and colorists who produced his book. He is a dead end to the color that bears his name.
The first Westerner to describe the fuchsia flower in the wild, French friar and botanist Charles Plumier, made several trips to the ‘New World’ to gather and describe plant specimens for Louis XIV of France.
On a visit to Santo Domingo in 1696, Plumier found a small shrub known as ‘molle ecantu’, (beauty bush) which he brought back to France and included in his 1703 herbal ‘New Plants of the Americas’ as ‘Fuchsia’ — named in honor of his predecessor Leonhardt Fuchs. Disappointingly, it was illustrated in black and white. Even worse, his seeds and specimens were lost in a shipwreck, and fuchsia plants were not imported to Europe until 1788.
When it finally arrived, the fuchsia plant was grown as a curiosity for a half-century or so. But when lithography became popular for advertising in the 1840s, the dramatic blossoms became irresistible to gardeners, and the unusual vivid pink of their flowers — not quite red, not quite purple — became associated with the term ‘fuchsia’. And here is where the problem of fuchsia-the-color begins to deepen.
Wild fuchsia flowers do not have a uniform color, and they were even less uniform after Dutch and French plant breeders began developing cultivars. Most of the elegant pendant blossoms on the market today are multicolored, with petals ranging from purple to red to cream to pink, each with a little tassel of golden (or pink, or red) pistils. Those colors are further subject to lighting and your own eye’s perception of color.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the colors shown were subject to further restrictions: the printer’s available inks and the copywriter’s descriptions. Even the term ‘fuchsia pink’ slips and slides under the written word. We can agree that it’s bright; but is it warm or very warm? Pink or red? Does it have purple undertones? If you compare the flowers with the prints with the written descriptions, the answer is never clear.
Gardeners and florists snapped up the plants anyway, charmed, like I am, by the fabulous color. By the middle of the 19th century, the passion for fuchsia-the-color had leaped from the greenhouse and garden into clothing and home goods, as the first aniline dyes were developed by French and English chemists. The first of these, mauvine, was a dull red that did not excite the public. The second was called fuschine, and it launched a craze.
Fuschine was manufactured by the French firm Renard et Freres, and is linked to the fuchsia flower by a pun — the dye’s bright reddish-pinkish-purple hue speaks to the flower and therefore to Fuchs, while the German word ‘Fuchs’ translates to ‘fox’, as does ‘Renard’; one imagines the head Frere of the Renard company feeling very clever as he approves the choice.
Even the best puns are not always appreciated. The brilliant new dye (one chemist described it as a ‘magnificent crimson color’) was marketed as the more pleasant-sounding ‘roseine’ for a few years, and then the name of the color itself changed — this time to ‘Magenta’, in memory of French and Sardinian victory at the Battle of Magenta in 1859.
Adding to the magenta/roseine/fuchsia confusion is the fact that fuchsine dye has a very flexible chemical structure. Chemists used gasses and ketones to change the color from bright to dull and pinkish to purplish, resulting in a range of colors — four in total during the Renard et Freres era — with the same interchangeable names, which must have been maddening for a lady trying to match shoes to a ribbon.
On the other hand, a range of names seems perfectly appropriate for a flower that was, by then, available in every shade of pink, red, and purple.
At the height of Europe’s passion for Magnificent Crimson, fuchsine was used to dye everything from wedding gowns to Christmas candy. An oversaturation of the market (sorry) resulted in a just-as-abrupt distaste for the color, in all its variations. As much as the late-nineteenth-century consumer loved vivid shades of reddish and purplish pink, the early-twentieth-century consumer was drawn towards calmer tones of earth, water, and sky, as demonstrated in the prints of William Morris, the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, and the textiles produced by the Arts and Crafts movement. Compared to the new trends, magenta-fuchsia, once so lively and fun, was now cheap and garish.
Fuchsia endured its out-of-date hibernation and then began to appear again, this time in art. In 1935, the English company Windsor and Newton began producing paint carrying the red-pink-purple pigment quinacridone. Here is another point at which the color fuchsia can be called a standard — and another point where the definition is slipperier than it appears, because as anyone who has tried to use a paint in the quinacridone family can tell you, the color is both vivid and translucent, leading to a brightness that practically shimmers, changing tones and hues like a child unable to decide on a favorite.
Around the same time, color theorists and scientists were coming to a surprising conclusion: that magenta-fuchsia is not actually on the visible light spectrum. It has no visible wavelength, lying either below the lowest wavelength (blue-violet) or above the highest (red). The color we see, when we admire a fuchsia flower or shop for a magenta ink cartridge, is a trick of the eye, a ‘bridge color’ our brain invents so we can interpret what we’re seeing. We simply do not have the correct photoreceptors to see fuchsia the way it appears to, say, a hummingbird, which has four cones in each retina compared to our three.
This is fair; we are trying to admire the flower, not eat it.
Even corporations employing color scientists are still unable to decide what fuchsia is. Crayola believes it’s purple, while Faber-Castell’s Fuchsia colored pencil (Color 123) is a dull pink. Benjamin Moore has a paint called Royal Fuchsia (Color 2078–30) — a vivid pink — and another called Magenta (Color 2077–10), which is red.
Pantone, the color matching experts who sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place, have a color called “Fuchsia Purple” (Color 18–2436), which is a pinkish-purple — their true fuchsia is called, of course, “Process Magenta”. In 2023, they named a duller, redder shade called Viva Magenta (Color 18–1750) their 2023 Color of the Year, describing it as “an animated red that revels in pure joy”.
Confusion reigns in the digital color world as well. The CMYK color model includes fuchsia as a primary color, but, like Pantone, calls it ‘magenta’. The RGB model treats it as a secondary color, created by combining red and blue at a high saturation. Finally, web color treats fuchsia-magenta as a single entity, with the easy-to-remember hex code #FF00FF.
After all this reading, I still don’t have a description of fuchsia at hand. The closest I have is the M circle of the CMYK model, which matches my idea of fuchsia pretty closely — although the more I look at it, the less sure I become: maybe it’s a bit reddish, or not quite bright enough?
But the idea that fuchsia is out there, misnamed but underlying much of the world’s color printing, is a comforting one. Like the color itself, it is there, blazing and fabulous; you just can’t see it, unless you have hummingbird eyes.
Sources:
https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-battle-for-magenta/2020242.article
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25555311/
https://daily.jstor.org/why-victorian-gardeners-loathed-magenta/
https://fuchsietum.com/blog/files/happy-birthday-leonhart-fuchs.php
