Warm Pelt Turquoise

Old English wearm, of moderate heat — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as containing red, orange, or yellow undertones. Warm gray, warm white: not necessarily a temperature, but the optical impression of a slight red-orange shift. Sits across the crisp and neutral buckets.

Old French pellete, small-skin. As a color modifier, pelt implies a fur-with-skin-and-hide quality, the visual register of fur-trapper-and-Hudson-Bay-Pelt hand-trapped-and-skinned beaver-and-otter-and-mink hand-trapped-fur-pelt-and-hide surfaces under Hudson-Bay-and-fur-trapper hand-trapped pelt-and-hide trading-post light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to hide and fur in usage.

The hydrated copper-aluminum phosphate mined in Persia and the American Southwest for thousands of years — the firuze of Iran, the chalchihuitl of Mesoamerica, the heart of Pueblo and Navajo silverwork. The color refers to a fine Sleeping Beauty turquoise from Arizona: a saturated, slightly green-shifted blue with the slight matrix of host-rock veining. Brighter than persian, lighter than cerulean.