Pleasant Lone Teal

From the French plaisant, pleasing — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as agreeable, the kind of color that wears well over a long viewing without becoming demanding or fatiguing. Pleasant green, pleasant rose: moderate saturation combined with optical comfort. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside easy and calm.

Middle English lone, shortened from alone. As a color modifier, lone implies a solitary-and-singular-and-isolated quality, the visual register of Caspar-David-Friedrich-Wanderer-and-lone-pine hand-solitary-and-singular-and-isolated Caspar-David-Friedrich-Wanderer-and-lone-pine-and-Romantic-vista loned-and-solitary-and-singular-and-isolated surfaces under Caspar-David-Friedrich-Wanderer-and-lone-pine-and-Romantic-vista mountaintop-and-empty-shore single-figure-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to void and drear in usage.

Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.