Scarlet

What color is scarlet?

The story of scarlet

Scarlet started out as the name of a fine woven cloth, not a color, and the cloth was usually but not always dyed red.

The word comes from the Persian saqerlat, by way of Latin scarlatum and Old French escarlate, and it named a high-quality wool cloth traded across the medieval Mediterranean. English picked it up as scarlat by 1250. Only once the cloth became linked to one particular red, the one dyed with kermes, did the word settle into meaning the color rather than the weave.

Kermes dyed that cloth first, the same insect that gave crimson its name, gathered from oak trees around the Mediterranean and traded from Persia to Rome. Cochineal arrived from Mexico in the 1500s and did the job better and cheaper, and within a few decades almost every fine scarlet garment in Europe was dyed with the Mexican insect instead of the old Mediterranean one.

Cardinals wear scarlet, not purple, though the phrase raised to the purple still means made a cardinal. In 1295 the church put its cardinals in red robes, but the shade was close to the imperial purple of Byzantium, made from murex shellfish. Only after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and that purple dye disappeared from the market, did cardinals switch to a scarlet dyed with kermes instead. The name for the honor never caught up with the wardrobe change.

England's soldiers were scarlet too, at least the officers were. The New Model Army adopted red coats in 1645 and kept them, in one form or another, until the First World War. Ordinary soldiers wore coats dyed with the cheaper madder; officers wore the true scarlet, dyed with the costlier cochineal, which is where the nickname redcoats came from even though only some of the coats were the expensive shade. After 1873 every rank finally got the brighter, cochineal-dyed scarlet.

Nathaniel Hawthorne leaned on all of that history without spelling it out. His Scarlet Letter, the A that Hester Prynne is made to wear, works because scarlet already meant guilt and display before he wrote a word: the color of cardinals and kings, worn now as a punishment instead of an honor. Paint it today and you reach for pyrrole red or cadmium red, both synthetic, both indifferent to whichever institution is currently wearing the color. Scarlet has dressed clergy, armies and adulterers inside the same three centuries. I just like that it goes on so cleanly.

Pigment facts

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

How to mix scarlet

Scarlet is one of the easier colors to reach honestly, because modern pigments were built to be exactly this: a clean, warm, orange-leaning red. Pyrrole red on its own gets you close, and cadmium red, warmed with a touch of orange, gets you the rest of the way. Push either one toward blue and you have wandered into vermilion territory, a different, older story.

The pairing that matters is with its cooler cousin. Scarlet next to crimson is the oldest contrast in the red family: one jumps forward, the other sits back, and a painting with both in it reads as having real depth in its reds instead of one flat note.

Using scarlet in watercolor

Use scarlet wherever a red needs to come forward and announce itself: a poppy in full sun, a stop sign, the one bright object that should catch the eye first in a painting. It is not a color for shadows or restraint.

It is a strong color, so a little goes further than it looks like it should on the palette. Lay it thin first and build up, rather than starting at full strength and trying to talk it back down.

It pairs naturally with its own family. A scarlet next to a crimson gives a painting two reds that read as different temperatures instead of one flat red note, and a scarlet next to a green makes both look more intense than either does alone.

One thing I learned the hard way: scarlet has dressed cardinals, soldiers and warning signs, but it does not play well with every neighbor on a modern palette. Next to some pinks it turns them muddy instead of making them glow. Test a new pairing on scrap before you commit it to the good paper.

Scarlet vs crimson (and vermilion)

Crimson is scarlet's cooler sibling, pulled toward blue instead of orange. Line the two up and scarlet jumps off the page while crimson sits back on it, which is the whole reason a red-heavy painting benefits from both rather than one red mixed lighter and darker.

Vermilion is the pigment that used to do scarlet's job before chemistry caught up. Ground from cinnabar, mercury sulfide, it gave artists from Botticelli to Renoir the orange-red they needed, and it is the direct ancestor of the cadmium and pyrrole reds sold as scarlet now. The difference today is mostly toxicity: vermilion's mercury against a pyrrole red's nothing at all.

If scarlet is a trumpet, crimson is a cello playing the same note an octave down, and vermilion is the older instrument they both replaced.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.