Crayola Lore

This probably ranks up there with my nerdiest posts, but I find this Crayola chronology positively fascinating. The retired colors section is vaguely depressing—I mean, what's wrong with blue gray, green blue, lemon yellow, maize, orange red, orange yellow, raw umber, and violet blue? Well, maybe raw umber—what the heck is umber anyhow, let alone raw? But I think lemon yellow is a very nice name for a crayon color.

I like the name changes, too: flesh to peach, Prussian blue to midnight blue, and Indian red to chestnut. So very PC.

Comments

[Elena]

That's very funny about the umber. I had a running joke with my house painter. When we were repainting the outside of the house, it seemed like no matter what color of tan I picked, he would say, "It has a lot of umber in it." And I would always say "What the heck is umber anyway??!" I still don't know, but I don't think my house has any!

[Karen]

Wikipedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_umber

[susan]

I remember fondly getting our first box of 64 Crayola colors. We were so thrilled! And it had a sharpener on the box. What more could a kid ask for?

[Susan]

"Peach" or not, my kids still say, "Where's the skin color?" when combing through their crayon box. They didn't get the P.C. memo.

[Elena]

I still don't know what umber looks like when it's not "burnt"!

[Mark]

I wish I read this earlier - just this Saturday I swore to my kids that they used to make a 128-crayon box back when I was growing up. D'oh! (Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I didn't have to walk two miles to school each morning, either. And I'm almost positive those walks never involved three feet of snow. I gotta start checking my facts.)

We were talking about crayons because my 5-year-old just got his first box with a sharpener in the back and thinks it's the one of the greatest inventions ever.