Easy Mull Turquoise

Old French aisié, comfortable, at rest — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues that read as visually undemanding. Easy beige, easy gray: moderate saturation combined with optical restfulness. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside calm and settled.

Middle English mullen, to-grind-or-ponder. As a color modifier, mull implies a slow-pondered-and-warmed-and-spiced quality, the visual register of mulled-wine-and-mulled-thought hand-slow-pondered-and-warmed-and-spiced mulled-wine-and-mulled-cider-and-mulled-thought mulled-and-slow-pondered-and-warmed-and-spiced surfaces under mulled-wine-and-mulled-cider-and-mulled-thought clove-and-cinnamon-and-orange-peel hearth-side-winter-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to muse and brood 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.