Trauma-Informed Color Palettes for Europe

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Europe

The color wheel comes from here. Newton bent the spectrum into a circle in 1704, and 18th-century painting theory settled on red, yellow, and blue as the primaries.

Europe’s older systems don’t use it.

Heraldry sorts colors by light and dark instead of by hue. Gold and silver on one side, red, blue, green, black, and purple on the other. Anything placed on a shield had to come from the opposite group: a gold lion on blue, never black on blue. The rule was written down by 1568, and it exists so a coat of arms stays identifiable at distance in poor light.

Russian has no word that covers all of blue. Light blue and dark blue are separate colors with separate names, the way English treats pink and red.