Orange is more than a simple crayon in the box or a fruit in your fridge. It’s practically everywhere, in science labs & old canvases, even in what you eat for dinner. But there are a few facts about this color that many people don’t know. Here are six interesting facts about the color orange. Which of these surprised you most?
Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock.
Skies turn orange near sunset due to the angles
You’ve probably noticed that the sky glows orange when the sun sinks low. That’s physics at work. Light has to travel farther through air at that angle, so short blue wavelengths scatter away first, and what’s left for your eyes are longer hues like orange & red. Scientists have even recorded this using atmospheric optics research.
Artists used mineral oranges like realgar and crocoite
Before synthetic paints, artists had to use minerals for their palettes. Realgar was one of these. It’s an arsenic sulfide that gave artists a bright orange, but it unfortunately darkens over time. They used crocoite, a lead chromate, for a more intense orange. However, this wasn’t the most stable.
Many stars really are orange to our eyes
Not all stars twinkle white or blue. K-type stars are cooler than our Sun, and they glow with an orange tint, with Arcturus being one of the brightest examples. It has a surface temperature of around 4,300 kelvin (7280°F). Many physicists have studied it & even used it as a calibration point in astronomy. Pretty cool, right?
The color orange didn’t exist in English until the 1500s
It sounds strange, but people in medieval England had no separate word for orange. They simply called the shade “yellow-red.” It was only once the fruit itself started arriving from Asia through trading that people invented the name “orange.” Interestingly, it came through French from the Arabic naranja before eventually sticking in English.
Orange is the hardest color for pilots to ignore
You might’ve noticed that a few things in a cockpit are orange. That’s because when safety engineers tested cockpit controls, they noticed pilots reacted faster to orange warnings than to red or yellow. The color stood out against everything else. As such, they reserved the color for emergency levers & fire handles, as well as other things that need to be noticed quickly.
A rare diamond type is classified as orange
Pure orange diamonds are a major prize among gem collectors. They don’t get their color from added impurities, but instead from unusual twists in the crystal structure itself. Collectors actually have to use spectroscopic scans to confirm the color because orange tones often blend into brown or yellow. “Real” orange stones are so rare that they often head straight to auctions.
The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this article:
- Berlin and Kay Theory
- Pigments—Arsenic‑based yellows and reds
- Single stellar populations in the near-infrared
- The Development Of The Basic Colour Terms Of English
- With flying colours: Pilot performance with colour-coded head-up flight symbology
- Naturally Colored Yellow and Orange Gem Diamonds: The Nitrogen Factor
