Frank Lone Teal

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.

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.