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Is it the darkest of all the colours, or simply the absence of light? Black has always been enigmatic. But one thing’s for sure: it has an extremely powerful effect on our psychology. It’s associated with death and fear, but also symbolises authority, elegance and sobriety.
Black – along with red – was one of the first colours humans ever used in ancient cave paintings. Over the centuries, the colour has been passed down from one generation to the next in myriad cultures, and has come to symbolise a vast array of things: fertility, wealth, heaven, violence and rights.
Today we’re going to tell you the story of the colour black, with a few anecdotes and pieces of trivia thrown in for good measure!
What colour is black?
Actually, a better question to ask would be: is black a colour at all? Colours stem from the refraction of light, and technically black is different – it is an absence of light, describing the situation when an object fully absorbs the electromagnetic radiation that makes up light, so none of it reaches our eyes.
In reality, however, black acts just like the other colours, evoking different feelings and reflecting a range of moods. And if you want to print or paint something black, you need to mix pigments to obtain something close to total black.
If you work in the digital sphere using the additive RGB colour model, black is created by the absence of the three primary colours red (R), green (G) and blue (B). The hex code for black is #000000. If, however, you are working with a printer and therefore the CMYK colour model, black is created from a combination of the three primary colours cyan (C), magenta (M) and yellow (Y), combined with black (K).
Curiously, it turns out that a blend of 60% cyan, 40% magenta, 40% yellow and 100% black produces a more convincing black than simply using 100% black. In the printing world this combination is called rich black.
The history of black: one of the first colours used by humans
Black was one of the first pigments ever to be used by people. In prehistoric times, black – produced from coal or manganese oxide – was used alongside red by our ancestors for their first paintings on cave walls.
Early civilisations also made widespread use of black. It had a special meaning for the ancient Egyptians, as it was the colour of the silt left when the Nile flooded, which made their land particularly fertile. Osiris, the Egyptian god of fertility, resurrection and the afterlife, was also black.
The ancient Greeks, meanwhile, developed an extremely sophisticated system for painting black silhouettes on clay vases, and later also used it as a background. The fashion for black-figure pottery then passed to the Romans. Various techniques were employed to create these complex vessels, including a mixture containing iron oxides, which took on a typical glossy black colour when fired.
On the other side of the world, in ancient China, black was considered the king of the colours. It was the colour of heaven, and Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, believed that all the other colours were derived from it. At the same time, oriental artists were very advanced in their black ink production: the first inks were invented in China over 2,000 years ago, before spreading to Korea and Japan.
In the west, in the Middle Ages black was associated with monastic life and authority, although from the fourteenth century noblemen and merchants started wearing black clothes, and so it came to represent them too. Black clothes were very expensive, as they required the fabric to be dyed over and over again, which obviously caused the price to rise.
After a few more ‘colourful’ centuries, black came back into fashion in the nineteenth century, among poets and romantic artists – who chose it for the way it symbolised melancholy – and among heads of state and business owners, who used it as a sign of their power.
Black in the twentieth century: violence and elegance
This takes us to the twentieth century, where black had a leading role in a whirlwind of events. In 1915, the colour was at the centre of a work considered the first example of abstract art: Black Square, one of the first paintings produced by suprematist artist Kazemir Malevich. This revolutionary and paradoxical creation called into question the entire concept of art through a simple monochrome square.
A few years later, the Fascists came to power in Italy and chose a black uniform for their squadrons. But black was not the sole preserve of fascism: in 1926, for example, the French fashion designer Coco Chanel created her petite robe noire or ‘little black dress’, which soon became a universal symbol of elegance.
This was revolutionary both in the world of fashion and in terms of people’s customs: before then, wearing a black dress at any time other than a funeral was considered inappropriate. Audrey Hepburn cemented the little black dress‘s iconic status in the 1960s when she wore it in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
In the tumultuous decades that followed, black often played an important role in countercultural movements. In 1966, The Rolling Stones sang Paint it Black, a hypnotic song with rather dark lyrics, in which the protagonist says he would like to colour the bright world surrounding him in black. Black was also central in the African American civil rights movement – from Black Power to the more recent Black Lives Matter – and associated with various musical cultures and subcultures: in 1982, for example, the British band Venom released an album called Black Metal that gave a name to an entire genre.
Scientific research into total black: Vantablack and the Blackest Black
Meanwhile, in recent years, scientists have started searching for the blackest black possible: a material that absorbs light so well you get the impression you are staring into a black hole. The first to get anywhere close were the inventors of Vantablack in 2014. This material, made of carbon nanotubes, captures over 99.9% of light and is available as either a spray or film.
This discovery was at the centre of an artistic dispute. In 2016, the British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive artistic usage rights for Vantablack. Many artists fought back: how can you buy exclusive access to a colour? One of the most furious was artist Stuart Semple who – as we described here – chose a rather bizarre way to get his revenge.
In any case, in 2019 the record for the blackest material in the world was broken by Blackest Black, discovered by chance by researchers at MIT while they were experimenting with nanomaterials. It absorbs 99.995% of light, and this time the two scientists who uncovered it ensured that it could be freely used by any artist.
Who will ultimately create the blackest black on Earth? Who will be able to take advantage of this colour and make use of its power? And how might you use black in your upcoming projects?