Lavender Color: History, Facts & How to Mix It

What color is lavender?

Full strength

Diluted

Pale wash

Graded wash

Hex	#B57EDC
RGB	181, 126, 220
CMYK	18, 43, 0, 14
Warm or cool	Cool, but only just. It carries enough red to stop it from reading as plain blue, which is exactly the balance that makes it easy to push too far toward either violet or gray.
On the wheel	A blue-violet, a hair lighter and grayer than a true violet. It sits between violet and blue, on the warm side of that particular pair because of the small amount of red still in it.

The story of lavender

Lavender is named after washing, not after flowers.

The word comes from the Latin lavare, to wash, by way of Old French lavandre. Romans scented their bathwater with the plant, and a lavandarius was someone whose job involved washing; the flower's name and the chore's name grew from the same root. The plant itself is older than the word. Lavandula is native across the Mediterranean coast, the Iberian Peninsula, the Adriatic, North Africa and the Middle East, as far as the edge of India, and Roman merchants once sold the dried flowers for about 100 denarii a pound, roughly a month's wages for a farm laborer, or fifty haircuts from a barber. That is an expensive way to smell nice.

A weathered engraving of the ruined interior of the Roman baths at Trier, with tall brick archways, cypress trees, and two figures resting among the ruins — *Interior View of the Roman Baths at Trier*, Johann Anton Ramboux, 1826. Lithograph with tint stone, 38 x 49.4 cm. The word lavender comes from the Latin lavare, to wash, and baths like these are where the habit started. The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

Given how long the plant had been valuable, the color name took its time. The first recorded use of lavender for a shade rather than a scent in English was in 1705, more than a thousand years after Roman soldiers were bathing in it. Painters have had their own trouble with it ever since, though the trouble is not history, it is chemistry. Lavender only exists as a mix, a blue and a red pulled apart by a great deal of white, and that combination is the easiest one in a paint box to push too far. Add a shade too much of either pigment and it slides into violet or blue outright; add a shade too little water and it turns to plain gray mud. I do not know another color in my kit that punishes a heavy hand quite this fast.

A botanical line engraving of a lavender plant showing its narrow gray-green leaves and two flowering spikes covered in small blossoms — *Lavandula vera (Lavender)*, illustration by David Blair, from Bentley and Trimen's Medicinal Plants, 1880, plate 199. An engraving, not a painting, for a color people still cannot agree how to mix. Wellcome Collection, public domain.

What you buy under the name today reflects the same split the word always had. Wikipedia lists two common hex codes for lavender: E6E6FA, the pale, almost-white tint most screens show, and B57EDC, a good deal more saturated and much closer to the actual flower. This page uses the second one, because it is the color a painter reaches for on purpose, not the color a monitor defaults to when nobody is looking closely.

There is a nice symmetry in a color named for washing turning out to be the one that washes out fastest in my own palette. I have ruined more lavender washes than any other mix I own, always by fussing with them after they were already right. The fix, same as the Romans probably knew, is to leave well enough alone.

Pigment facts

Colour Index	Not a pigment. A color name; in watercolor it's mixed from a blue such as ultramarine (PB29) and a touch of a red such as quinacridone (PV19), lightened with titanium white. In dry paints, the same trick works with purple and white pencil or pastel.
Transparency	Depends on the blue. Ultramarine-based mixes stay fairly transparent in thin washes; a version leaning on phthalo blue turns more opaque as it darkens.
Lightfastness	Excellent, if you build it from ultramarine and a quinacridone red. Both rate well on their own, so the mix inherits that.
Granulation	Noticeable. Ultramarine granulates on its own, and diluted this far, that texture shows up as soft speckling rather than a flat wash.
Staining	Low to moderate. The ultramarine lifts fairly well while damp; the red component stains a little more and leaves a faint ghost once dry.
Toxicity	Non-toxic. Modern ultramarine and quinacridone pigments carry no heavy metals.

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

How to mix lavender

Lavender is not a pigment you buy so much as a ratio you protect. Ultramarine and a touch of a cool red such as quinacridone will get you the hue; the part that actually matters is how much white goes in after. Too little and you have a plain violet, closer to mauve than to lavender; too much and you have lost the color altogether.

Twilight Indigo is the pairing that matters here, because it is the ingredient that pulls a pink-leaning violet back toward true blue-violet. Add it a little at a time; it is strong, and lavender has no patience for a heavy hand. If you keep drifting toward periwinkle instead, you have added too much.

Mix	Recipe	Best for
Lavender from scratch	Ultramarine and a touch of quinacridone red, then a lot of titanium white	Pale violet washes, distant hills
Truer floral lavender	The same mix with less white, closer to full strength	The flower itself, painted up close
Shadow on snow	Lavender very dilute, mostly water	Shadows on white walls and snow
Evening sky	Lavender with a touch more ultramarine	Dusk, the hour before a storm
Wisteria	Lavender with a speck of the red added back in	Flowering vines, a warmer violet

Closest mix from the Tobio's kit

Royal Plum and Twilight Indigo, roughly equal parts, then thinned with a lot of Titanium White until the color barely holds on to itself. Add the white gradually; lavender is the mix in this kit most likely to slide into gray if you rush it, and once it has, more pigment will not save it. Test on scrap first.

The 12-color kit does not include a tube of lavender, 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 lavender in watercolor

Use lavender for anything that is technically white but obviously is not, in the right light: snow in shadow, a plaster wall at dusk, the pale side of a cloud. It is also the color for the flower itself, thinned right down for a whole field and closer to full strength for one stem in a vase.

Build it as a graded wash. Lay the palest version first and let it dry, then come back with a slightly stronger pass only where you need more depth. Lavender loses its color fast if you try to darken it in one go; it turns to gray sludge on the paper instead of a deeper violet.

It pairs naturally with its cooler cousin periwinkle, and with any warm neutral nearby that stops it from reading as flat gray.

One thing I learned the hard way: lavender is the color in this kit most likely to turn to mud, because it only survives as a mix of two pigments, and everything added after that is a third. Stop at the blue and the red. Reaching for a third color to fix a flat lavender is exactly the habit that turns it gray.

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

Lavender vs periwinkle (and mauve)

Periwinkle is the one people mix up with lavender most, and the two sit close enough on the wheel to earn it. Periwinkle's usual hex, CCCCFF, is a plain, pale blue with no red bias at all; lavender's floral hex, B57EDC, has visibly more red pulled into it, which is what tips it from blue toward violet.

Mauve is the other neighbor, and it separates out more easily once you know what to look for. Mauve is named for the mallow flower and Perkin's 1856 dye, and it leans warm, toward magenta. Lavender is named for a wash, not a dye, and leans cool, toward blue. Both fade toward gray if you are not careful, but they fade from opposite directions.

If lavender is a plaster wall at dusk, periwinkle is the sky just after, and mauve is the flower still sitting on the windowsill inside.

Questions people ask

What is lavender color?

Lavender color is a pale violet-blue named for the Lavandula plant. Wikipedia lists two hex codes: E6E6FA, a near-white web tint, and B57EDC, closer to the actual flower and the shade this page uses.

Is lavender warm or cool?

Cool, but only just. It carries enough red to keep it from reading as a plain blue, which is also why it is easy to push too far toward violet or gray.

What colors make lavender?

Ultramarine and a touch of a red such as quinacridone, lightened with a lot of white. From the Tobio's kit, Royal Plum and Twilight Indigo, thinned with plenty of Titanium White.

Why does my lavender wash turn gray?

Because it only survives as a two pigment mix, a blue and a red plus white, and every extra color pulls it toward mud. Keep it to two pigments, and add water rather than more color to lighten it.

Lavender vs periwinkle, what is the difference?

Periwinkle sits closer to true blue, with almost no red in its usual hex, CCCCFF. Lavender's floral hex, B57EDC, carries visibly more red, which is what tips it toward violet.

Where does the word lavender come from?

From the Latin lavare, to wash. Romans scented their bathwater with the plant, and the word traveled through Old French lavandre before entering English, first recorded as a color name in 1705.