Calm Joy Sky

Latin calma, heat of the day — paradoxically drifted in Italian to mean stillness. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as untroubled. Calm blue, calm gray: moderate saturation combined with optical quiet. Sits at the crisp-bucket near quiet and steady.

Latin gaudia, delights. As a color modifier, joy implies a bright-and-radiant-and-uplifted quality, the visual register of Provençal-troubadour-and-Florentine-Carnival-joy hand-bright-and-radiant-and-uplifted Provençal-troubadour-and-Florentine-Carnival-and-Renaissance-festa joyful-and-bright-and-radiant-and-uplifted surfaces under Provençal-troubadour-and-Florentine-Carnival-and-Renaissance-festa banner-and-procession-and-piazza festival-day-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to bliss and glee 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.