Frank Gloam Moss

From the Old French franc, free, sincere — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as direct and unhedged. Frank red, frank brown: moderate-to-high saturation combined with optical directness. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside direct and honest.

Old English glōm, twilight-or-dusk. As a color modifier, gloam implies a twilight-and-half-light-and-fading quality, the visual register of Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-gloam hand-twilight-and-half-light-and-fading Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-and-Orkney gloamed-and-twilight-and-fading surfaces under Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-and-Orkney long-northern-twilight-and-blue-hour gloaming-and-twilight light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to dusk and shade in usage.

Bryophyta — the nonvascular plants that colonized land 470 million years ago, before vascular plants and far before flowers. The color refers to a thick mat of Hypnum or sphagnum on a temperate forest floor: a soft, slightly yellow-shifted green with the velvet texture of millimeter-scale leaves. Dustier than fern, deeper than lichen, with the slow patience of a plant that lives by absorbing rain through its surface.