colour

See Color. [Brit.]

Widely used in foods to increase their aesthetic appeal; may be natural, nature-identical, or synthetic. Natural colours include carotenoids (yellow to orange-red in apricots, carrots, maize, tomatoes), some of which are vitamin A precursors. Chlorophylls are the green pigments in leaves. Anthocyanins are the red, blue, and violet pigments in beetroots, raspberries, and red cabbage. Flavones are yellow pigments in leaves and flowers. Caramel, used for both flavour and as a brown colour, is made by heating sugar.

In addition to all these there are various ingredients such as paprika, saffron, and turmeric that also provide colour.

What is commonly referred to as colour is technically hue, as distinct from chroma (the purity of a colour) and colour value (the component greyness amount).
[Jones L. A. J. Opt. Soc. Amer. Vol. 27, 207-13 (1937)] All three must be considered together for complete specification of ‘colour’. Among pertinent methodical schemes
[Billmayer F. W., Saltzman M. Principles of Color Technology (New York: Interscience, 1966)] are the Munsell system of 1907 (primarily for art and used heavily in the printing industry), the Ridgway system of 1912 (for ornithology),
[Ridgway R. Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (Washington, DC; author, 1912)] the Ostwald system of 1918, the CIE system and ISCC-NBS system. Both the names and the significance of colours have been subject to standardization.
[BS 381C Specification for Colours for Identification and Special Purposes (1988)]

For more information on colour, visit Britannica.com.

Colour is the most prominent example of a secondary quality (see primary/secondary qualities). Philosophical opinion has always been divided over whether to allocate colour (and smell, taste, and sound) to the physical world, or to regard them as holding their ‘residence entirely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such quality would be abolished and annihilated’ (Galileo, Opere complete, vol. iv). The atomists and Epicureans of the ancient world held the latter view, and it returned to popularity with the rise of 17th-century science. More accurately, we can distinguish at least five general families of philosophical position: (i) colours of things are the microphysical structures responsible for the different reflectances of light of different wavelengths by their surfaces; (ii) colours are the powers or dispositions bodies have, in virtue of these structures, to affect our visual experience in particular ways; (iii) colours are properly qualities of experience itself, displaced or projected onto external things; (iv) colours are complex dispositions of the perceiving subject, differentially triggered by different surfaces; (v) colours are to be identified with complex neurological events. The last two are a subjective mirror image of the first two positions. Many of these suggestions face well-aired problems: whether they are even consistent with the fact that colours are visible, for example, and whether they make them intersubjectively accessible. Mixed and more complex theories are also found. Recent colour science has highlighted the extremely complex function of energies at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that result in things being perceived as one colour or another. Such work, emphasizing the active role of the brain in generating a definite experience from the complex flux, has tended to favour theories on the more subjective side of the fence, but the topic is currently wide open, even to the point of some theorists craving a pre-Galilean, Aristotelian, innocent confidence that the world is, in itself, coloured just as we take it to be. One interesting constraint on a successful theory of colour is its ability to explain various necessities: that yellow is a bright colour, that there cannot be transparent white, nor a grey flame. See also qualia, private language argument.