Gaudy Olmec Sky

Middle English gaude, trick / showy ornament — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, gaudy implies a saturated-and-cheaply-bright-and-overdone quality, the bright color of carnival-and-fairground novelty-attraction painted-and-lit decoration. Sits at the bright-and-flamboyant end of the grid, parallel to garish and lurid in usage.

Nahuatl Ōlmēcatl, rubber-people. As a color modifier, olmec implies a pre-Classic-Mesoamerican quality, the visual register of Olmec-civilization-of-La-Venta pre-Classic Mesoamerican hand-carved colossal-head-and-jade-and-pottery archaeological surfaces under La-Venta-and-San-Lorenzo pre-Classic Mesoamerican Gulf-coastal humid light. Sits at the modifier-and-cultural end of the grid, parallel to aztec and toltec in usage.

The blue of a clear sky at noon — produced by Rayleigh scattering, the preferential dispersion of shorter wavelengths through atmospheric molecules. Air itself is colorless; the color we see is sunlight scattered toward our eyes by every cubic kilometer above. The reference shade is mid-latitude noon under a high pressure system: a clean, slightly green-shifted blue with the luminous depth of light scattered across an entire hemisphere of air.