Plain Kin Moss

Latin planus, flat, level — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as undecorated and direct. Plain white, plain blue: moderate saturation, no shift, no surface effect. Sits in the crisp-bucket center, with the implication of restraint rather than absence.

Old English cynn, kindred. As a color modifier, kin implies a blood-relative-and-extended-family quality, the visual register of pre-modern-English-and-Anglo-Saxon hand-built family-hearth-and-meadhall-and-grandfather-clock blood-relation surfaces under Anglo-Saxon-and-pre-modern-English family-hearth-and-meadhall household firelight. Sits at the modifier-and-cultural end of the grid, parallel to clan and tribe in usage.

Bryophyta — the nonvascular plants that colonized land 470 million years ago, before vascular plants and far before flowers. The color refers to a thick mat of Hypnum or sphagnum on a temperate forest floor: a soft, slightly yellow-shifted green with the velvet texture of millimeter-scale leaves. Dustier than fern, deeper than lichen, with the slow patience of a plant that lives by absorbing rain through its surface.