Lit Carved Turquoise

The past participle of light — short and modern. Used as a color word since the late twentieth century for hues that read as if they were illuminated. Lit yellow, lit pink: the implication is luminance combined with the slight optical impression of an internal light source. Sits in the bright-bucket extreme alongside electric.

Old English ceorfan, to-cut. As a color modifier, carved implies a hand-cut-and-shaped quality, the visual register of Romanesque-and-Gothic-stone-carving hand-cut-and-shaped stone-and-wood-and-ivory hand-carved-and-relief carved-and-shaped surfaces under Romanesque-and-Gothic hand-carved-stone-and-wood workshop-light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to hewn and limned 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.