Lush Fuzz Sapphire

Middle English lush, possibly from lascious, lascivious — a word that drifted from sensual ripeness toward visual abundance. Used as a color word since the eighteenth century for the saturated greens of well-watered foliage and the deep saturated jewel tones of velvet upholstery. Used across the deep and bold buckets where the hue is simultaneously dark and vivid.

Imitative-onomatopoeic origin, attested 17th-century. As a color modifier, fuzz implies a soft-and-fluffy-and-imprecise-edge quality, the visual register of peach-fuzz-and-felt-fuzz hand-felt-and-soft-fluffy peach-and-felt-and-pelt-fuzz hand-felt-and-soft-fluffy-fuzz surfaces under hand-felt-and-soft-fluffy peach-and-felt-and-pelt-fuzz light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to fluff and shag in usage.

An iron-and-titanium-bearing corundum — the same mineral as ruby, hardness 9 on the Mohs scale, mined for two millennia from Sri Lanka, Burma, Madagascar, and the Cashmere mines of British India. The color refers to a fine Kashmir-cut sapphire: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted deep blue with the gem's signature internal velvet — a quality of light scattering in the stone that faceted glass cannot replicate. Cooler than cobalt, deeper than azure.