This past Friday of Sorrows while Javier (BUREAU DELLAFLEUR) was working on Viento10’s floral arrangements for the Holy Week, a conversation came up between Gerardo and him about the color of the flowers.

One said they were purple the other said they were mulberry and a third one that was passing by thought of them as mauve…As a professional designer I could have settled the dispute, however, I must admit that these particular range of colors have always been a bit confusing to me. I was in deep waters, thin ice. I went back home but I couldn’t stop thinking about the colors, so I decide to check with the Wikipedia. I entered “mulberry” in the tab and the Wiki said:

Mulberry (from vulgar Latin mōra, and this one from the Latin mōrum “blackberry, fruit from the blackberry bush”) is a purple or a blueish, dark and deep purple, with its original reference being the color of the blackberry. The name of the color “mulberry” doesn’t indicate a specific color but a whole family of colors alike between them.

So, if I understood it correctly, the mulberry color is a purple color. That doesn’t sound right, let us check on purple:

Purple is the color or colorations between red and blue, or more specifically, it is a dark magenta between the colors violet and crimson. In popular culture, purple, violet, lilac, mauve, magenta or crimson work as synonyms. This names have, however, different etymologies and, despite being colorations between red and blue, they have developed their own specific meaning. Being a blueish purple, mulberry is technically purple color. The difference between purple and mulberry is somewhat semantic since the adjective of the mulberry color comes from describing the pigmentation of blackberries. This needs clarification for in Spanish the word for blackberry  (“mora”) is certainly similar to the word for the mulberry color (“morado”). It would be as if the word “blackberry” stood for the fruit as well as for the mulberry color.

Now we’ve done fixing the problem! So mulberry is technically purple says the Wiki, it is not going very well. Let us read violet then:

Violet is a color of purplish or mulberry tone that can be an intermediate point between blue and purple, hence it can also be called purple blue. The first reference to violet are the petals of the flower that goes by the same name.

How funny is the Wikipedia!, violet, it says, is of purple or mulberry tone. This must be my lucky day, I can’t seem to solve this little issue.

On top of that, here I present to you the examples the Wikipedia gives of each color so that you can, from now on, and without a doubt, distinguish purple from mulberry. Oh, well… Can’t you tell? That makes four of us.

Furthermore, neither mulberry nor purple are colors from the spectrum. Only violet belongs to the spectrum defined by Newton. Just like Mr. Isaac used to say: “Color floats uncomfortably between the subjective world of sensation and the very objective world of facts.”

How about you? Do you get it? Which one would you say is the color of la Pasión?