Loud Loki Peridot

Old English hlūd, making noise — borrowed metaphorically as a color word since the nineteenth century. Loud red, loud yellow: a color so saturated it announces itself without needing surrounding context. Sits in the bright-bucket extreme alongside electric and striking. Carries a slightly pejorative implication of excess.

Old Norse Loki, trickster-god-and-shape-shifter. As a color modifier, loki implies a trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly quality, the visual register of Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster hand-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok loki-and-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly surfaces under Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok Yggdrasil-and-Aesir-pantheon shape-shifter-light. Sits at the modifier-and-myth end of the grid, parallel to thor and odin in usage.

The transparent green variety of olivine — the gem mined from Egyptian Zabargad Island since pharaonic times and now from arid mountain ranges in Pakistan, Arizona, and Vietnam. The color refers to a faceted peridot: a clean, slightly yellow-shifted green with the gem's signature internal warmth. Lighter than emerald, brighter than olivine in its rough state, with the unusual gem-trade quality of being one of the few minerals that occurs in only one color.