For the course of Storia delle Cose given by the teacher Vittorio Marchis we were asked to create a blog to deepen our knowledges about a color and the wide world that exists around each of them that we have no idea about. Sometimes we don't know their names, how to create them or we don't even know about their existence... but colors are everywhere.
When I first started looking for informations, it was very hard to find things about the color Amaranth itself. Since the very beginning, while looking for the meaning of the color and color code, I found out that Amaranth is a flower. So most of the information being found was related to the plant or its grain. The color itself comes from the color of the flower and it also gets its meaning from its Greek mythology: ever-lasting. To a better definition, it can be found on the Dictionary of Colors by A. Maerz and M. A. Paul in the post protagonist, even though it's not represented by the color known today as Amaranth.
To make the search easier we looked for how to say our color name in different languages so we would find a bigger diversity of interactions of the color and different cultures. The languages helped me a lot in posts such as the one about music (in which Amaranth can be found in song titles, in their lyrics, as names of albuns or even names of bands all over the world), fashion design (where it can be found on the toge universitaire, a traditional costume used by students of the science field in France) and cinema.
Continuing on the Design field, it can be found in product design in a whole amount of objects. The one I chose to represent the color was Kouple Bathtub and Sink by Karim Rashid since the artist himself is known for using a lot of pink shades in his designs. In graphic design, it had been found in advertisements from a long time. I picked some examples, but the color is very present in cigarettes ads or related to women. It can also be highly found in Italian soccer teams' logos. From that and whole other researches, I came to know that Amaranth is very present in the Italian environment, and it is even the official color of one of its cities, Reggia Calabria.
Moving forward in the geographic world, if you're thinking about going to Portugal, you should know about the small town Amarante in the north of the country. It takes the name of the color, but it's nothing related to it. On the other side, in Russia, we can find the color on the architecture of The State Historical Museum in Moscow.
In the scientific world it can hardly be seen by the physics who believe that the pink is the absence of the green color. But the truth is that it exists and can be seen due to the red sensitive cones activation together with a certain amount of blue and green sensitive cones. That's how it's possible for us to see the food additive E number E123 found in Chemistry. Even though its use is prohibited in a lot of countries, in the ones it isn't, it's a food colorant that creates the Amaranth color. Not only food can be artificially colored, but they can also be originally with the pinkish shade. The color can be specially found in fruits and vegetables. The amaranth dye is also used in a 1977's patent about Blood Gas Control to give the red color to the acidosis control.
But that's in the "exact's" field. In the "humanistic's" field it can mostly be found in different types of arts, such as in paintings, comics or video games. It can also be revealed in various literatures, such as documents or poems and further more in popular sayings that people use in their every days.
During the lessons, we deepend our knowledges using the book Pensiero Selvaggio by the anthropologist Levi Strauss and Autopsia di una Macchina, a presentation by teacher Vittorio Marchis. According to the first one, we should talk about the primitive dimension of the color and with the second one try to enter in the "color's body" and talk about its anatomy as we were it.
For the color cloud I chose the flower as the shape of my brainstorm, for obvious reasons, and filled it with some words that, after all these discoverers better describe the Amaranth color in my opinion.
I hope you agree with it after reading all the posts and getting to know this beautiful and deep color better! Hope you enjoyed this adventure as much as I did!
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