Earnest Mistral Indigo

Old English eornost, seriousness, zeal. Used as a color modifier since the nineteenth century for hues that read as committed but unshowy — the working blues of denim, the deep greens of Quaker meetinghouses. Sits in the bold-and-quiet corner of the grid, slightly less luminous than resolute and slightly less institutional than imperial.

Provençal mistral, cold-northwest-wind-of-Provence. As a color modifier, mistral implies a cold-Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-wind quality, the visual register of Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-mistral hand-cold-Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-wind Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-mistral-and-Alpilles mistral-and-cold-Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-wind surfaces under Provençal-and-Rhône-Valley-mistral-and-Alpilles Avignon-and-Saint-Rémy-and-Camargue cold-Rhône-Valley-wind-light. Sits at the modifier-and-weather end of the grid, parallel to sirocco and gust in usage.

Indigofera tinctoria, the South Asian legume whose leaves yield the deep blue dye that has clothed humanity for at least four thousand years — Egyptian linen, Mayan textile, the slave-grown plantations of Carolina. The color refers to a freshly indigo-dyed cotton thread: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted deep blue with the slight lustre of a fiber surface oxidized in air. Deeper than cobalt, cooler than royal.