Yellow, a discredited color

The yellow press, yellow fever, and jaundice, the cowardly yellow-belly in English slang, the yellow star imposed on the Jewish people by the Nazis. All negative connotations of the color yellow. It has been used throughout the ages to mark the mentally ill, traitors and outlaws in order to differentiate them from the rest of society. Even in France, the jaune cocu is the color of the cheated husband.

Yellow is little appreciated by the taste of people throughout the history of the West. Although it was not always like that. Associated with the sun and its energy as a vital stimulant, it loses its positive halo in the Middle Ages when the gold color monopolizes the symbolism of light, divine spirit, power and wealth. Faced with the dazzling magic of gold, the strength of yellow fades into pallor and negative feelings such as lies, heresy, illness and greed.

In South American and Eastern cultures it enjoys greater esteem, and in China, it is the emperor’s own color with life, joy, and opulence implications for infinitely greater of course for the imperial family than for the rest of his millions of subjects.

The ochre pigment, among natural organic dyes, was one of the first used in art: in the cave of Lascaux, France, there is a yellow horse painted 17,000 years ago.

The miniaturists and painters of medieval Europe used gamboge yellow, a pigment brought from Asia and extracted from the trunk of a tree in Cambodia, gamboge, whose sap was collected in bamboo sticks and once solidified turned into powder for watercolor painting mainly. It was prescribed for the treatment of various ailments but proved to have laxative effects so it came to be used as such in pharmacy. It stopped being used as a painting material because of its high toxicity and low durability over time. 

A mystery surrounds the Indian yellow pigment sold in the form of balls that were diluted and processed until they obtained a highly valued shade in 17th-century painting. For some, it came from the urine from cows subject to a forced diet of mango leaves, and the pigment strong smell corroborated this theory. Other scholars concluded that it was of vegetable origin. A chemical test in 2018 revealed the presence in the samples of an organic acid found in the urine of herbivorous animals, which seems to confirm that this was indeed the origin of the pigment. However, it was no longer used and none of the hypotheses for producing this dye used by European painters such as the Englishman Turner or the Dutch Vermeer and Van Gogh were ever known to be true. It was finally replaced by a synthetic one, with the cows blessing.

In Buddhism, the saffron-yellow robes worn by monks as a renunciation of the outside world were instituted by the Buddha himself for his followers in the 5th century BC. According to the scriptures, different dye shades can be obtained from different parts of the plant. The robes had to be boiled in water for a long time to obtain the exact shade. Saffron and ochre generally came from turmeric or the heartwood of the jackfruit tree, the fruit in vogue among vegans today.

Whether it’s canary, honey or mustard, amber, or dandelion, yellow has better implications today: it symbolizes friendship, optimism, and knowledge, and experts say it stimulates the brain to release serotonin, the pleasure hormone. Because of its high visibility from a distance, it has been chosen for warning signs on the roads, for taxis and school buses. Let us end with a favorable wink in these times: a yellow flag displayed on a boat states that it does not need to be quarantined.