Chartreuse Color: History, Hex Code & How to Mix It

What color is chartreuse?

Full strength

Diluted

Pale wash

Graded wash

Hex	#7FFF00
RGB	127, 255, 0
CMYK	50, 0, 100, 0
Warm or cool	Technically cool, since green is a cool color and chartreuse leans that way, but it carries so much yellow that it behaves like a warm, energetic color on a page.
On the wheel	Chartreuse sits exactly between yellow and green on the color wheel, tipped slightly more toward green in its bright web form and slightly more toward yellow in its older, softer form.

The story of chartreuse

Chartreuse cannot decide whether it is a green or a yellow, and neither, honestly, can anyone else.

The name comes from a liqueur, not the other way around. Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery, tucked into the mountains north of Grenoble that share its name, had been sitting on an old alchemical recipe since 1605 and did not get it working to their satisfaction until 1737, well over a century of quiet tinkering before the drink existed in the form anyone would recognize today.

A watercolor view of the Grande Chartreuse monastery buildings set in a wooded alpine valley below gray mountain peaks, with ordinary greens rather than acid yellow-green — *Paysage de la Grande Chartreuse*, attributed to Jean Lubin Vauzelle, late 1700s to 1800s. Watercolor with graphite, 34.7 x 49.9 cm. The actual valley the color is named after. The green here is an ordinary forest green, not the acid yellow-green the word later came to mean. The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

The color took the name more than a century after that. The earliest print citation anyone has found for chartreuse as a color rather than a drink is a British newspaper from 1884, describing something as a pale apple-green. Before that sentence existed, chartreuse simply was not a shade anyone could look up. Every argument about the color since has really been an argument about what that one newspaper writer meant.

That argument is still going. When the X11 color list was drawn up for early computer displays in 1987, it defined chartreuse as the point exactly halfway between green and yellow, hex 7FFF00, and called it chartreuse green. But the shade that painters and dressmakers had been calling chartreuse since the 1890s was yellower and paler, closer to hex DFFF00, and some older color dictionaries still list that shade as the real chartreuse yellow. Ask two people to picture chartreuse and you may end up with a lime and a mustard.

A Mithila folk painting of a rider on a red horned creature, outlined in black with scalloped borders filled in mauve, chartreuse yellow-green, and black — *Rider and Four-Legged Bovine Creature in Mauve, Chartreuse and Black Palette*, Mithila (Madhubani) school, Bihar, India, 1900s. Ink and color on paper, 36.3 x 26 cm. The museum's own catalog calls this yellow-green chartreuse, which is about as close to a real-world sighting of the color as it gets. The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

Look for this color outdoors and you will mostly come up empty. It shows up for a few weeks on new leaves before they finish making their full share of green, on the crust of a few lichens, and on the odd fungus, and then it is gone again. Nature treats chartreuse as a stage rather than a destination, which may be why it looks so unnatural anywhere else, on a raincoat or a tennis ball.

I do not think chartreuse needs to pick a side. I keep both versions in mind when I mix it, the sharp modern green and the softer, yellower shade from before anyone owned a screen, and I let the paper decide which one a picture needs. A color that has spent a hundred and forty years arguing with itself is allowed to stay a little undecided.

Pigment facts

Colour Index	Not a pigment. A color name; in watercolor it is mixed from a clean yellow with the smallest amount of a green or a green-leaning blue worked in, never sold as a single tube under this name.
Transparency	Depends on the yellow you start from. A transparent yellow such as a modern hansa or lemon keeps the mix glassy; a more opaque cadmium yellow makes a denser, more covering chartreuse.
Lightfastness	As good as its ingredients. Built from a modern synthetic yellow and a lightfast blue or green, it holds up well. Older recipes built on a fugitive yellow such as gamboge would not have.
Granulation	Usually smooth, since the yellows and blues typically used are fine synthetic pigments rather than earths or minerals. Substitute an earth yellow and you get a little texture instead.
Staining	Moderate to high, depending on the blue or green used. A phthalo-based mix will not lift once dry; a mix built on an ordinary yellow lifts more easily while damp.
Toxicity	Non-toxic. The modern synthetic yellows, blues, and greens used to mix it are all considered safe in normal studio use.

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix chartreuse

Mixing chartreuse yourself is easy. Mixing a chartreuse you actually like is the hard part. Start with a clean, warm yellow and add the smallest amount of a green-leaning blue, a drop at a time, until the yellow just starts to cool. Sap green or a touch of phthalo green does the same job from the other direction, warmed back up with more yellow than you would expect to need.

The failure runs in two directions. Too little blue and you have a highlighter, not a color. Too much, or too much water squeezed in with it, and it slides into the flat, sludgy green that shows up in a lot of beginners' landscapes. Mix it wet, test it on scrap, and stop the moment it looks like new growth rather than a warning label.

Mix	Recipe	Best for
Chartreuse green, bright	Lemon yellow with a small touch of phthalo blue	New leaves, screen-bright accents, poison-warning labels
Chartreuse yellow, traditional	The same mix, tipped back toward yellow, about four to one	A softer, paler yellow-green closer to the 1890s shade
Grayed chartreuse	Either version with a whisper of a red-violet	Taming an electric mix, distant foliage
Deepened chartreuse	Chartreuse mix with a small amount of sap green	Sunlit leaves against a darker hedge

Closest mix from the Tobio's kit

Lemon Yellow gets you most of the way there by itself, since it already runs warm and clean. Work in the smallest speck of Green Gold to pull it into a true chartreuse green, or use Glacier Blue instead if you want it leaning a little more toward teal than yellow-green. Add the green or blue one drop at a time. It takes far less than you expect, and past a certain point you cannot easily pull the mix back toward yellow. Test on scrap first.

The 12-color kit does not include a tube of chartreuse, so this is how I get there with what is in the palette. Running low on a color? The 12 paint refills drop straight into the wells.

Using chartreuse in watercolor

Use chartreuse for the moment before a landscape settles into its ordinary greens: new growth on a tree in April, the first blades of grass after rain, a patch of lichen on a rock. It reads as fresh in exactly the places where a regular green reads as static.

It works best in small doses next to darker, quieter greens, a single lit branch against a hedge, rather than spread across a whole page. Painted everywhere, it stops looking like spring and starts looking like a warning sign.

Wet-on-wet, it spreads fast and bright, which suits a soft patch of new growth. On dry paper it holds an edge well enough for a single leaf or a highlight, though it can look a little plastic if the edge is too crisp.

One thing I learned the hard way: chartreuse dries brighter than it looks on the palette, not duller the way most colors do. Mix it a shade quieter than you think you want, let it dry fully, and only add more if it still needs it.

Everything I use on this page is the Tobio's Watercolor Kit: twelve colors chosen to mix, a walnut palette, cotton paper, and a water brush. Want to see how any two of the colors blend before you commit? Try the interactive color mixing chart.

Get the kit

Chartreuse vs lime (and yellow-green)

Lime is the fruit version of the same idea, a shade named after the citrus rather than a liqueur, first recorded in English as a color in 1890, only six years after chartreuse. It runs a little greener and less yellow than chartreuse yellow, closer to the skin of the fruit it is named for.

Yellow-green is the plain, unglamorous term for the whole family, the one you would reach for if you did not care about a fashionable name. It usually describes a duller, more muted version, sitting somewhere between chartreuse and olive, without either color's brightness.

If chartreuse is a shout, yellow-green is the same idea said quietly, and lime is chartreuse with the volume turned toward citrus instead of the liqueur that started it.

Questions people ask

What is the chartreuse color?

Chartreuse color is a yellow-green partway between yellow and green, named after a French liqueur. The bright web version is #7FFF00; an older, softer chartreuse yellow is closer to #DFFF00.

Is chartreuse green or yellow?

Both, depending on who you ask. The modern web color, chartreuse green, sits exactly halfway between the two. An older sense of the word, now called chartreuse yellow, is paler and leans more toward yellow.

What colors make chartreuse?

A clean yellow with the smallest amount of a green-leaning blue or a green mixed in. From the Tobio's kit, Lemon Yellow with a speck of Green Gold or Glacier Blue.

Where does the name chartreuse come from?

From a French liqueur made by Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery. The color name came later, first recorded in English in 1884, well over a century after the drink itself existed.

Does chartreuse exist in nature?

Rarely, and briefly. New leaves show something close to it for a few weeks before turning an ordinary green, and a few lichens and fungi land near it too, but it is not a common outdoor color.

Is chartreuse a warm or cool color?

Technically cool, since it leans toward green, but it behaves like a warm color because so much yellow sits inside it. It reads as bright and energetic rather than calm.