Purple. It is such a wonderful colour. I’ve always loved it. It is my favourite colour. In the colour spectrum, it Is in the range of hues between red and blue. Interestingly, according to colour theory, violet and indigo are not true purples but in most people’s minds they are, because they do come between red and blue in the colour spectrum, just in vastly different proportions.

As a child, I was mocked because I always adored the colour and my school uniform was purple. Since it was de rigeur to loathe anything remotely associated with education, I was a figure of fun and ceaseless ribbing. I was just as likely to be called Mulberry by one of my friends, as by my given name.

Purple has normally always been associated with royalty and nobility, possibly because in the distant past, only the very rich or elite could afford any clothing of Tyrian purple. This might have been, in part, due to the fact that the colour of the dye was produced from the mucus of a snail that was found on the shores of the city of Tyre, in ancient Phoenicia (currently known as Lebanon). Similarly, in China, Han purple, an artificial dye, was used by the emperors from 500 BC to 220 AD. It was used, for example, to decorate the Terracotta Army. The closest natural colour to Han purple is the colour of a crocus. The very first mention of the word purple in Europe was apparently in AD 975, so it can lay claim to having a good, long pedigree.

Violet is a spectral colour with a shorter wavelength than blue, whilst purple is not. There is no such thing as a wavelength of purple light and it does not appear on Newton’s colour wheel because it is a combination of red and blue or violet light. What is known as super-spectral. The difference between violet and purple is that violet becomes bluer in hue as light intensity increases, because of something that is (rather splendidly) known as the Bezold-Brucke shift. Purple, on the other hand, remains constant; no increase in blueness is evident.

On a chromaticity diagram, the line that connects the extreme spectral colours, red and violet, is known, somewhat romantically, as ‘the line of purple’ or more prosaically as ‘the purple boundary’. Interestingly, magenta is bang in the centre of this line, although most of us would associate magenta far more with red/pink than with purple, which we think of as much bluer. This is where whoever designed my school uniform was correct in every respect, because in the sixth form we wore a lavender shirt, a deep mulberry jumper and a magenta blazer….all different shades of purple.

Purple has all kinds of interesting connections. In France, academics who study Divinity dress in purple, as do most senior officials, such as Rector, Chancellor, Head of Faculty. Purple was the colour of the university I attended, Durham, and was known as Palatinate. Purple is associated with Saturday on the Thai calendar but in Japan, it is associated with death. In China, the literal translation would be ‘Purple Forbidden City’. The purple triangle was used by the Nazis to differentiate unorthodox religious groups, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the military, a purple manoeuvre is one that involves more than one of the armed forces and in the USA, a Purple Heart is given to those wounded or killed in the line of duty. The purple hand is a gay and lesbian symbol against homophobic bullying. In Spain, purple represents the common people and red monarchism whilst for the rest of the world, it is the other way round. And most of us know that Prince wrote Purple Rain!

You might also like to know that, like orange and silver, no other word truly rhymes with the word purple. That in Star Trek, klingons have purple blood. That Byzantine religious texts were written in gold lettering on Tyrian purple parchment. And that Alexander the Great, the kings of Egypt and the Roman Emperors all wore Tyrian purple. So if you choose to wear this noble colour, you are in very exalted company!

…oh, and I hope you don’t consider this ‘purple prose’ ….!!