Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Color Magenta

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/podcasters Caitlin Gill (GuaranteeShirts.com, new album 'Major.') and Alana Johnston ('Self Esteem Party' podcast) for a look at why magenta is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Magenta. Known for being a color. Famous for being a cartridge. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why magenta is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Two wonderful guests this week. Caitlin Gill is an amazing stand-up comedian. Her latest album is entitled Major. It's amazing. She's also an extraordinary podcast guest. She was on the very first episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. The first one. Thrilled she is back for this. And then beyond all that, Caitlin runs a t-shirt business that's awesome. It's

called Guarantee Shirts. That's GuaranteeShirts.com. I own a couple. They are soft. They are wonderful to wear. They're also fun and clever to look at. Big old link to GuaranteeShirts.com is in the show links. And then along with Caitlin, I'm thrilled to be joined by Alanna Johnston, who is a wonderful comedian you may have seen on College Humor, Disney XD, Conan, IFC, or elsewhere. And then Alanna is a tremendous podcaster. She makes a show called Self-Esteem Party. Self-Esteem Party is a blend of comedy and honesty. It's Alanna and guests exploring what it

means to, you know, feel good about yourself and be a person. Also, everybody is a comedian. Everybody's very funny. It's a great show. It's on the Sonar Podcast Network. Just look for self-esteem party. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Caitlin recorded this on the traditional land of the Yuhaviatam

and Marengayam peoples. Acknowledge Alanna recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about the color magenta. Magenta is a patron pick for this month, thank you to Joshua Graves for that great suggestion and to Caroline Gaston for cheering it on. One extra note here, Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May have been the guests on past

SifPod episodes about colors. We decided to mix that up. So Adam and Jeff will be back. It'll be for other shows, other topics. And I am thrilled for you to hear me and these wonderful guests finding out how deep the magenta rabbit hole goes. So please sit back or imagine a magenta rabbit hole, right? It's a habitat for a rabbit. It's bright magenta. Feels very Easter Bunny. I love it. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Caitlin Gill and Alanna Johnston. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Caitlin, Alanna, it is so good to have you here and talking about this amazing color.

I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about the color magenta? Caitlin? Do you dare? Do you dare go first? I've been recently obsessed with the color magenta. I had no presence in my life and then suddenly was everywhere in the last year as I did start printing things

in the last year. So I have become intimately acquainted with how a printer works. And then I started screen printing where I became the printer. And I have a little tub here of mixed magenta ink for screen printing. So I have become all too intimately familiar with magenta in terms of how, like how to make it, how to, how it plays with others sort of, but it's like, um, I don't know. It's sort of like how I know how to use the internet in that I understand to Google things and then you click links, but I have no idea how the magic rays meet my smart box. Like I have no idea how any of it actually works or its history or why, or like who made it or how we figured it out. So it is magic much like the

rest of the world to me, but magic I have become all too familiar with. And, and Caitlin, I'll ask you later to send me a picture of that little tub of magenta. Cause she had that ready to go folks. She didn't like tell me to pause and go get it. She was like, I've prepared the magenta for the show. I'm ready. We are inches away from where I work all day. So I didn't have to move to get it. If there's an illusion of space provided by video conferencing, then I think, again, the magic of the Internet, which I don't understand.

But every day, every day I use it. Wow. Caitlin, that was, yeah, that was awesome. That goes, I'm so glad you went first. Cause that goes perfectly in ham with my response, which is, uh, when it comes to magenta, it is magnetic. I am drawn to it. So Caitlin, you brought up putting it, um, on shirts or like the color, like whatever for the screen printing and that's like when i'm shopping or i mean obviously a lot of online shopping and checking stuff out always always drawn to a magenta always and because it it is magnetic it's so bright but not like a neon blinding type bright it's just like i guess the word would be vibrant, maybe vibrant more so

than bright. And I think it really suits my personality. All my, all my lipsticks are a pinky version or however we get to the magenta color. I have one that's like a magenta color. Um, yeah, close to it. And so it's like, it's just like my color. It's just my color. That's great. That's awesome. Yeah. That's it's like, I'm so drawn to it for my personal fashion. Like, absolutely. I love it. Well, and, and Alana, your podcast chart has magenta in it, I think, or something like it. So I was like, I wonder if this person's into that. There you go. It does. I asked my designer, um, Desdemona, uh, when she was like, what colors do you want to use?

And I was like, Oh, I was like, give me a version of pink that you like. And that was her pick. And I was like, that's perfect. Yeah, dude, she picked that out. It was like, it was like a perfect match because her and I had never met before. And I was like, Oh, she like gets it. She totally gets it. That's awesome. Testimony coming through. Jinx. It's such a weird, it's like saturated saturated it's a rich color and it's deeper than you think and like having learned now uh you know it's so integral in how we make every color and alex i think you're gonna like teach me a lot about this in the upcoming uh hour and i am super

excited but it is like painting with it, literally like putting it in a screen to screen print with and watching it play with other colors. And I'm actually really bad at, I'm pretty good at spot color, but CMYK printing is like really hard. I'm still learning about how to make all these colors play together.

But magenta is not the one you think is the dark, like black is the darkest, obviously, but like cyan, yellow, and magenta, magenta comes in as the darkest and you don't think about its job that way but it is the richest of all the ones that like mix up to make all the rest of the pretty colors and like it's everywhere you don't stop seeing it once you start seeing how colors play together your whole brain's taken over and the grocery store and every landscape and every car you see is just like, Ooh, how'd they do that? Watching the color wheel come to life in a Ralph's she said. It's so borderline of a pink and a

purple. That's why I love it. And red and black and red and like, yeah, everything. It's all hanging out there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's why I like it because like you said, rich, that's like such a good word to describe it. It feels very like, you know what it feels like? Like the, uh, cushion cover of like one of those Victorian couches, uh, you know what I mean? Like the gold, the gold rim on them and everything like that. That's what magenta feels like where you would, or like on a beautiful Ottoman velvet footstool type thing. I'm like, yeah, dude, that's magenta. Very like classic. Right. But then also in like 50s Art Deco and then also in 70s cheese and then also in bad 80s

kitchens and then also in like 90s, like, you know, beverage, everything. And like, you know, t-shirts and like Technicolor, like the ones that change color. I feel like those were magenta and then blue. Like it's everywhere. We can't like, because it's such a playful little character and you need it to make all these other, or the way we've printed historically has used it in so many applications. It's, it's always there. there avocado isn't always there as a color sienna isn't always there as a maroon comes and goes fern green and you're you're talking about like friendship like there for you as a friend really pulling through got your bag like i clutch my tiny eight ounce cup of

a precious magenta ink she gets me through yeah right? Magenta picked me up from the airport. That was really great. Really appreciated it. That's what I'm talking about. Magenta will drive to LAX. She will. Old magenta comes through. Absolutely.

A little earlier, you guys mentioned before, too, like having a lot of pink or purple or even red being this, because that was the first thing I ran into trying to learn about this color is that a lot of different things describe it as a pink or a purple or a red or something else. Like I did an episode of this about beige a few months back and beige is the same way too. Like kind of every different tan is beige

and every different pink, purple, something else. Somebody's like, that's magenta, even though who knows, you know, it's all perception. perception yeah like i said i i go by the lipsticks yeah i think that's true though for blue and for green like when you think about the range of what we'd call green from like neon biker shorts to like oh you know to the flannel like 90s or you know something super dark right like blue does that too but you know it's blue i feel like magenta is one of those weird middle colors that's like who's that and it's like you don't know who she is you know pink and you know purple and you'd call them but somehow

magenta is neither and both and also none of and some nobody agrees on what it is, but it is tough formula. There is like a formula. Isn't there, Alex? Is that a question I can ask you? There is like obviously a like Pantone mix for magenta. Like it's a specific color, but it's got to be. There's got to be a pretty codified value for cyan, yellow and magenta. Right. That's like industry standard.

Yeah. We won't really talk about the same yeah we won't really talk about always the same we won't really talk about the science of that but it is definitely that's fair a thing where especially printers like not just for shirts but everybody's home printer or whatever like that machine thinks it's getting a magenta in a specific way yeah they're uh man and i'm sure they're like corporate formulas it's insane i've gotten too deep too deep and there's only more to learn but it's like a laser beam color it's like it has to be this exact thing because of science and other colors yes whatever greens the forest sure who cares yeah i was gonna

say without knowing anything about it it does feel like one of the more scientific colors to me if i had to take a stab at it. Just funny that it's so science-y and our eyes are just like, yeah, whatever. I guess it's that. Like, artistically, we're very flexible about it. But in terms of our technical application, she's measured. We know who she is. Yeah.

Well, we can get into a bit of that, too, because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called We'll Do Math If We Want To. We can leave those jocks behind because if there's no math and if there's no stats, then there are no friends of mine. And that name was submitted by Adam Miller. We have a new name every week please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to sifpod on twitter or to sifpod at gmail.com thank you adam don't slumber on those numbers i'm into it i think we could take this right to the radio i'm into the remix a hundred percent i I loved that jingle. I thought that was great.

Oh, thank you. It feels like a Matthew song. I think Adam really hit something at the core of the real one. Well, the first number here is about that printing stuff. It's the year 1893. And 1893 is the year that somebody first patented magenta as a printing color. And that's according to Ernie Smith. He does a great blog called tedium.co.

And their research says that in 1893, an illustrator named William Kurtz patented the first color separation technique for printing, where you have separate plates for magenta, cyan, and yellow. And then you get, you know, basically what your home printer does and why your home printer is constantly like, I need more cyan or I need more magenta, cyan, and yellow. And then you get, you know, basically what your home printer does and why your home printer is constantly like, I need more cyan or I need more magenta. Everything's wrong. You know? Yeah. My printer does. I had to get a new one. Couldn't align. I know this isn't about printers, but could not align. Couldn't get it. Oh, wasn't happening. Like it was always printing sideways or something like it was just out it was always doubled like slightly doubled so you couldn't you just couldn't read it which is like if i'm reading something for me fine i can get through but you couldn't send any professional

docs and are you saying so alex are you saying when we do the printer, like how it does the color ink, the color test, that little pink one's magenta? That one is? Yeah, it should be. Yeah. Or else it's seeing how well it mixes magenta with something else it's trying to do. But yeah. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, it's very common with the color of like everything we manufacture or print out. And the follow-up number here is 1906, because that's when a company called the Eagle Printing Ink Company introduced a wet ink version of it and also introduced black as a fourth color. So then we get the acronym CMYK for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key. And key is the technical term for black in that printing situation. So they figured out, we'll save a lot of ink if we don't make black by stacking these other three colors intensely like let's just also have a black cartridge and then then we get out all of it yeah and we'll save a lot of time by calling it key instead of black we've got more time on our hands less letters i understand what these guys were going for nice and snappy making moves like really fast

philosophy everywhere calling a totally dude watch out for the bad boys of printing these guys are messing around oh man a quick YouTube search of screen printers will tell you that that is absolutely true it's a grizzly bunch they're pretty

adorable it is a lot of great ponytails and like band t-shirts tucked into. It's a grisly bunch. They're pretty adorable. It has a lot of great ponytails and like band t-shirts tucked into jeans. It's a lot. It's fun. Oh, I love it. It's funny because, well, yeah,

I wish I was coming for one guy, but it's a full page of responses that are just that guy in different forms. I'm like joking. At that time, or like the printing process was still pretty manual uh so there'd be plates for each color on whatever machine machine you were using right is that the like we didn't get into

printers that spit out paper until later i should know when because i like have turned it into a job but i don't i don't know when we started doing that. If I'm being, I started doing it in 2020, but others I think started much earlier. Yeah. It's this 1890s, early 1900s. They come up with how to print on paper. And, and I think later on is like t-shirt printing. There was garment dye before that, but like the exact putting a picture on your garment is later. And then most computers are on more of a red, green, blue system. But the cyan, magenta, yellow, that's how we stamp stuff, print stuff, you get newspapers and so on. Oh, I don't I know it. It's almost like you have to tell your computer and printer the difference between what's happening on the screen

and what's happening on the page. It's almost like they're totally different color values and mixes. It is fascinating to like see how they all play together in a more hands-on way because red and magenta are not the same. And like, and blue isn't on the table. What's blue? What is blue? Blue's everything. Sky and water.

So yeah, it is interesting to watch the way colors interact between screen which is where we usually design them these days and then box which spits out a combination very specific cyan magenta and yellow like learning who they are is crazy not the same they're not the same yeah caitlin, I love your shirts. And also I feel like maybe this topic is really rabbit holing you into your day job, you know, it's like, it's like not a break. So thank you for, I appreciate you enduring the rants, but it is fun to like, you know, it is a topic I've been thinking a lot about on this one side and, uh will now uh stop yelling about it so i could hear more about its early history it's cool i'll just hold my tiny jar in my jar of magenta we'll just listen little pet yeah

well there's really there's one other number here before the takeaways and the number is 8.3 million u.s dollars so a little over over $8 million US. And that is the auction price of the one cent magenta. And I sent you both a picture of it. The one cent magenta is considered the rarest individual postage stamp in the entire world in all of history. And it's magenta colored, like it's dark, but that's that's accurate. It's pretty. Yeah, it's very pretty. I mean, I didn't know that hot fact. But I mean, kind of kind of changes when you look at it being like, I mean, it's not that pretty, but OK. You know, but yeah, at a first glance.

Yeah, it's cute. I'm into it. Did you say eight.3 million? Uh-huh. Yeah, dude. 8.3 million. You know, that is a lot of money, but you're saying that's the most valuable stamp, right? Is that it?

Or the rarest? It's both, yeah. It's the most valuable and the rarest and everything. I remember being nine and thinking stamp collecting was like the ticket. Did anybody else have that little book of coins or like you start your new biology or stamp collection and you're like, this is it. This is my ticket. I'm going to be the one that saves the right stamp and I'm going to be a gazillion. But to hear that the top prize is 8.3 million is like a lot of money. But childhood me is I'm going to be honest, a little disappointed.

Well, here's the thing. You got to ask yourself when you're hearing this kind of dollar sign, am I going to be on the receiving end of that letter? You know what I mean? It's like, who values me at $8.3 million that they're going to use that stamp to mail me a personally written letter. So that's what I want to know is I'm like, am I of that value to you? Am I worth that money? You know what I mean? Like if I was this person's partner, that would be my first demand is I'd be like, hey, dude, where are we at? What's really good? What's going on?

What is this? What are we doing here? I've imagined Atlanta on a date like, yeah, you sent me a love letter and it was a forever stamp. So are you even committed to this. Like, yeah, you sent me a love letter and it was a forever stamp. So are you even committed to this? Like, why are you? I don't think I got my husband. I had the proof. I said, excuse me, you made a commitment, my friend.

Thank you. Marriage by certified male. I like it. That's what I'm saying, right? Trap him while you can. Just post office minister. If you're in the building, they're allowed. They're like a ship's captain.

They can do it. Yeah, exactly. The longer name for this stamp is the 1856 British Guyana one cent magenta. And it's rare because it's the only remaining one of a just weird situation. What happened is there was the colony of British Guyana. It's now the independent country of Guyana, but it's in South America. They were supposed to receive a shipment of postage stamps by boat. And there was a problem. They only got 5,000 stamps instead of 50,000. And so they said, we don't have enough stamps for mail in British Guyana. The local postmaster printed a set of provisional stamps and they tried to take

them out of circulation. And one kid kept one of them, which is this incredibly rare one cent stamp. And, you know, and from there, basically collectors, it's like anything people collect, they've just increasingly agreed it's worth more money. The most recent auction in June of 2021 sold it for $8.3 million. And they actually expected it to go for a lot more because the previous auction went for $9.7 million. And NPR says they were predicting a 15 million dollar auction in June of 2021 for this one stamp. That's just super specific. Wow. What happened to that kid? Oh, I apparently he sold it for not very much money and then other people increasingly made more money off it.

Yeah, he didn't become a titan of wealth or something. Yeah, a titan of stamps. something. A titan of stamps. No. I know. I'm sorry about the dream. How odd. I've never heard of anything like that. It doesn't mirror all of history everywhere.

Invade and deplete resources. That's funny how the little stories are also the big stories. You know, it's cute how that always works. Every time. Just a beautiful parallel. Yeah, full circle. You know, put a stamp on that. Ha, ha mail it to me please thank you alex we give out our addresses at the end of this right that's how this podcast works oh yeah yeah i mean the audience sends love letters to every guest and we rate the postage, and then marry from there.

Oh, I would love that. I would love that. Well, and from here, we have three big takeaways for the show, all about the color magenta. Here we go into takeaway number one. The creation of magenta was an accidental side effect of the battle against malaria. Okay.

Whoa. Yeah. There's always been like stuff that is magenta colored, but creating it as a dye and as a concept came out of experiments to fight malaria. That's how it happened. Cool. Is that? Oh, okay. I never guessed that.

Yeah. That's a huge takeaway oh my god this is the 8.3 million dollar stamp of our time for magenta i absolutely would have assumed that it was math done backwards here's just to say how i was wrong considering i've been playing with this stuff for so long that like as we figured out more and more about colors we realized what colors combine to make other colors and then we endeavored to make the three most efficient colors did we need to do that or did we accidentally stumble upon a very pretty dye like indigo just a lot later how did we do it oh why did malaria make magenta and this development is a couple decades before that

CMYK printing comes along. So I think that always would have been the printing color we needed. But we've got a few sources here. One of them is a great book called The Secret Lives of Color by Cassia St. Clair, cultural historian and design journalist. Also artsy.net piece by Amanda Scherker and then a Smithsonian piece byian piece by aaron blakemore because like creating magenta stuff happened in the mid-1800s and it was the kind of second color that came out of this accident the first one was mauve which is more of a purplish color so is this like an attempt to make malaria more fun? Like what are we talking about? Why?

Change it up, give her a look. Yeah. Are we, were we trying to brighten the moon? Like what was going on? I gotta know. The color of fever.

Yeah. Like what was it? Like the doctor's like, there's no known cure, but we have this Miami vice stuff if you would like it. And maybe that, maybe that's helpful to you. Uh, it's like, there's no known cure, but we have this Miami Vice stuff if you would like it. Maybe that's helpful to you. It's really, really fun to wear. Yeah.

So there was a phenomenon from, and this is another colonialism thing, but from the 1500s all the way into the 1900s, European countries are trying to colonize tropical locations, which brings them into contact with malaria. And the only known treatment at the time for malaria was quinine. And quinine is a medication that's not really used today because it has strong side effects and we found alternatives. But at the time, the only way to get quinine, the only treatment for for malaria was to harvest it from the bark of a tree in south america called the cinchona tree so all these european empires are like all our people are catching malaria and the only solution is this tree bark how do we just synthesize that how do we come up with an artificial quinine to fight malaria so that was the goal okay so not as fun as i initially thought how does that accidentally make magenta how do we get how did it was it just a very pretty salute like if we rub these dyes together if we make their lips look good maybe they'll feel better see if

that does the trick well and so from there they're just saying hey what's like every substance on earth and can we turn it into quinine somehow right and so there was a chemist it was an 18 year old british chemist named william perkin so a teenager and in 1856 he's trying to synthesize quinine from coal tar and coal tar is like a toxic waste substance that comes from gas lights i know there's a lot of chemistry you don't need to really follow it intensely but he's taking old coal tar trying to turn it into malaria medication and he accidentally makes dye he like does his experiment and says i don't have medication but when I dip fabric into this, it is bright purple. It's a bright color I will call mauve. All right.

Okay. Yeah. How did you land on mauve, kid? An 18-year-old came up with the name mauve? I mean, I have a series of follow-up questions very specific to that moment, but I will leave them for time travel and when I get to interrogate that young man. Yeah. Apparently the name is from the French name for a flower.

That is that color. Oh, that's the way I answer. I just thought he sneezed and accidentally wrote down the sound he made. Yeah. Much like the key. He is trying to save time and he just, instead of the long flower name, he said, Mo, let's shorten this. Let's get on with it right yeah the flower name was probably huge like lemonade exactly exactly get out with

it i'm a busy kid he was like i'm 18 i have so much to do i'm so smart i have to get these other things done i'm a baby genius. Move over color. I'll go. I'll see myself out. I'll just leave. Linda, and with this mauve dye, it's what's considered the first modern dye because they made it from something synthetic and it was also super cheap to make, super long lasting. So then there's this huge mauve fashion craze because regular people can afford it and everybody's wearing this pretty purple. And then immediately other chemists say, what's my mauve? How do I make a bunch of money on an

artificial dye made out of old coal tar? What do I do? And basically the first next big color is magenta. And it was parallel invented by a chemist in france named francois emmanuel verween and also a british firm called simpson mall and nicholson like everybody came up with magenta at that same time and it was another huge fashion hit in 1858 that's when we got like the dye of magenta and kind of the idea of it that's awesome wait yeah i love that they were both fashion trends and that does make sense fashion and what we wear always has this odd path through society in different ways through science through the environment and that's just an interesting collision that a dye made of waste then became a fashion craze which is like

beautiful but also you, tends to lead toward a path of environmental destruction somewhere down the line. Like if you, it's awesome to repurpose the waste for one thing. And so funny to lead fast forward to fast fashion now, uh, where I don't think they're making a lot of it from recyclable materials. Just funny what we invented from necessity we then uh turned into convenience over time because it is valuable we kind of love it it's pretty we like it we place all of other colors we do that with everything we do do we know how to turn the tables on a product let me tell you we are good at that we're very good

what do you mean she says drinking water from a can what do you mean yeah that that's all dead on and and also i it's it's not a thing i have sources for i just wonder if part of these purples and pinks and stuff i feel like they're associated with ladies and i think it's partly because they were immediately a fad with, like Mauve caught on first with the Empress of France and with Queen Victoria and then magenta follows, you know, like, like these colors became ladies fashion right away.

And I wonder if that kind of pointed us there with the association with it. We're trendsetters. Ladies are. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. In my trendsetting. Ladies are. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Thank you. Yes.

In my trendsetting crop top. Thank you. I feel like there is this funny crossover where a lot of the fashionable masculine colors were pretty bright, kind of in correlation with military regalia, which for many years was like bright, powerful colors. And some of them might have been kind of maroony, but a lot of like blues or indigos or reds or strong golds, like bright colors. Yeah. And I seem to recall that World War I put a quick stop to all of that. And the gray and green army quickly became the preferred fighting tool as, you know,

a red army, like literally not like a figurative one, you know, a red army, like literally not like a figurative one, but a, like the French army, World War I-ish, like red, literally wearing the bright red, white, and gold is not going to fare as well against like tanks and horses in a gray mass that you can't even see approaching. So I think it's funny that like, maybe there's just a weird timing element where for a long time, men were colorful and fashionable. And part of that was this like pageantry of, you know, how those colors were used and what they represented and the switch in that around

mid-century of like, you know, as things industrialized and colors became accessible in both a new production way and then into new classes it's just interesting how that morphed and changed where maybe a little bit earlier turn the clock back a century on using these colors and they would have been army's colors you know france's magenta army isn't insane to think about wow if it was cheap to produce and fast but you know they were using other methods of production and other colors at the time. And those colors became masculine. It's just funny. Everything's drag.

That's what I'm saying. We're all pretending. Caitlin, that's incredible. It leads straight into takeaway number two. Takeaway number two. Yes! The name Magenta comes from the French army pants in a battle near an Italian town. No way.

That's beautiful. What happened? That camouflage change around World War I, on that old beige podcast, we talk about beige becoming an army color then. But before that, it was brightly colored armies. And basically, as soon as magenta dye is invented, it becomes a military color, and that's where it gets its name. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. It didn't last long, huh? is invented it becomes a military color and that's where it gets its name interesting yeah yeah it didn't last long huh didn't really get a chance to shine in a military industrial complex no it's timing just wasn't great right because you said like it was like 1893 yeah a couple decades when it would have been some sharp pantaloons um yeah but yeah pretty swiftly after that it's gonna go out of fashion in terms of warrior apparel but fashion always it always comes back everything comes back around so i'm just waiting to join the army until the colors change when they get back to the vibrant rich colors like magenta um that i'm into i will Yeah, there's still there will be a Marine

recruiter that finds you with a free pair of magenta pants and that's going to be all it takes from this podcast, from this podcast. Absolutely. I'm going to regret saying this. Absolutely. Honestly, any institution that can provide me with free pants that fit, I would consider joining at this point. I would consider it at least. I'd put it on the table. Like along with the love letters at the end, if any world militaries want to send us recruitment material, you know, just send that in. I am interested in all branches, all countries. I'm flexible. You know, let's do it. We're going to use this as the soundbite. We're going to lure them in. We're all joining the army because of these pantaloons. This is what's happening now.

That's how we hook them. Yeah, I love it. That's how we get them. That's how we do it. Yeah, forget Call of Duty. A sharp pair of magenta riding pants. That's what's going to do it. That's what I'm saying.

More like Call of Ruby. Am I right? That's the general shade. Anyway, so this magenta dye gets invented in 1858, and then it gets the name magenta in 1859. Because actually the people who invented it, the French chemist Verween, he calls it fuchsia after the flower that's already called fuchsia,

and this is a color we know too. The British call it rosane. And it's just kind of this bright color that is immediately first purchased by some militaries. In particular, the French army, they have light infantry units called zouaves that they are basically co-opting how they think people dress in North Africa, because France was colonizing that. And they're like, oh, we'll have these fun, baggy, bright colored pants for our suaves. And so starting in 1858, some of them are magenta pants. They're dressing in that style.

That's wild. What a strange picture as somebody who's like, you know, I think all of us in just about any age range in America, conflict and military conflict has been a part of our life and our history. And there's a pretty solid picture of what that looks like. And I'm going to admit that inserting a pair of magenta pants is a jarring change to the picture I have of military activity and incursion. I'm not going to say I don't like it i'm just saying right it's a change from the picture i have it's weird how much pants has influenced my life and i didn't even know it oh yeah it's right we're all influenced by these like french light infantry

units in the 1850s weird that's what i'm saying goes direct to me goes direct yeah yeah well and uh and then from there so we've got these french pants and then it turns out there is a town in northern italy named magenta that is the source of the word magenta uh it's it's you can visit it today there's about 20 living there. Well, I'll have a lot of links for people because the history of Italian unification is sort of dense and there's a lot to learn there. But along the way, there's basically a bunch of little wars to try to turn Italy from a bunch of different countries on a peninsula to one unified independent kingdom. And in 1859, there's a war between Austria and an alliance of a couple Italian kingdoms and the French. It's super brief, but the main battle is near the town of Magenta. And one of people's takeaways from this battle is, hey, look at those colorful pants on those troops. Let's name this after the town and the battle of magenta. And so

the battle of magenta near the town of magenta leads to those French pants being called the color magenta. I mean, if I have to be involved in a war every time we're naming a color, count me out. Okay. This feels like a dramatic way to get to the name of the color. I bet a lot of lives were lost for absolutely no reason. Really bloody battle actually. Yeah. Yeah. It was very bad. It's weird because, um, when we were describing the color, we use words like vibrant, rich,

but what we didn't use was intense. And that to me is now the descriptive word of this color. I'm changing my tune. I'm changing my tune. I'm changing my tune. Yeah. Yeah. And the name partly came from people were like, oh, Fuchsia, this flower name or Rosane, this other flower name. That's way too like girly for this masculine military pant color let's call it

magenta after that cool fight that just happened which is not how it's thought about it today now it's like for your printer or for a bright lady's outfit yeah for my printer yeah that's it's either i put a dress on or i print something there's two options for me every day. I just choose between them. It's making me feel a lot better about things like lol making it into the dictionary. Okay, you know what? Whatever dumb word we want to come... Like lol

getting into the dictionary didn't laugh out loud as an abbreviation get added to the dictionary or raffle or something. Every year there's controversy over what word is going to make it into the dictionary or raffle or something like every year there's controversy over what word is going to make it into the dictionary uh or what selection and it's always some modern word that feels trite its introduction causes some stir and of course it would be great now if i had illustrative examples but you know what i'm not googling mid-podcast so i don't but we know

the scraps where it's like no you can't put like snickerdoodle in the dictionary. That's not a real word. Well, yeah, I'd rather, as long as it's not the battle of snickerdoodle, like that's fine. Whatever dumb way we want to cut them up with words seems better than like, well, the pants of the men who slaughtered my family were a very bright color. Let's name it after my town. That's a crazy way to add to the collective language discourse. I'll stick with goofing off online. I think that's an appropriate way to build communicative tools rather than the common reference of the color of the pants of those who came to raid. That seems like a bleak way to come up with our phrases. Yeah, no one died for OMG. It was fine.

It was totally peaceful you know what good i i think you're right i think that's a safe position people were on board with omg people wanted in and they got in on the ground floor and they're grateful for it and it was harmless it's a harmless word harmless that's the key yeah what's fun is that atheists and christians alike can enjoy oh my gosh with no consequence everyone's enjoying it yep we're in it's a if anything it's a unifying word if anything it's brought us together that we can all enjoy omg yeah yeah that happened peacefully and then and again if people want to know everything about the Second War of Italian Independence, where the king of Sardinia and France teamed up against Austria, they can.

But this one battle in it and this town you can visit in northern Italy, that's where the name Magenta comes from. I think it's a particularly strange color source name. Name of a color source. There we go. Agreed. It's very funny that Zoom decided to fuzz out right as world history in depth became the topic. Just on my end, I enjoyed a very humorously timed technical hiccup.

You know, if Zoom's going to interrupt us, you've got to call out the times when it's fun. Zoom's like, Kayla and Alana, get some water. He's really going. Like, you take a break. I did have a sip of water. Yes, I did. I know a break when I see one. I absolutely had some water, of course.

Very advanced Zoom. I love it. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway before that we're gonna take a little break we'll be right back i'm jesse thorne i just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls.

Len, there's one more takeaway for the main episode here, and we can get into it. Takeaway number three. For trademark purposes, one company basically owns Magenta. Always. Yeah. They don't like entirely officially control it, but they're suing people for trying to use Magenta as their logo or their company color. And they're mostly succeeding. And the company, the parent company is Deutsche Telekom.

And Deutsche Telekom is a Fortune 500 company, very large German company. And then they have subsidiaries all over the world. In the U.S., they are T-Mobile. In Canada, they are T-Systems. It's that magenta cell phone company that is all over the world. The T-Mobile, Pink? You're trying to call that as magenta? No, I'm scrapping that.

They extremely call it magenta. Yeah. There's no way. I'm putting my foot down. Take a hike. No. You know what? T-Mobile, if you're listening, as my carrier, that's not magenta. You're with me, right? I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. No. Yeah. That's pink. Kids, pack your suitcase and walk right out of magenta. You're pink. A bold one at that. of magenta you're pink a bold one at that i like that right they're facilitating a lot of people hearing this and also take a hike t-mobile get out of here uh no way i think that's how we feel about our cell phone carriers this is one of capitalism's most abusive relationships it's the same it's all the same i'm 40 just let

me give me credit for getting most of the words right and for operating zoom appropriately this is fun to be the age now where i can be like look i did it right and that's like i get credit for that that's yeah i'm 40 just let me enjoy the internet the way i want to please slow and it makes loud noises when I start it. Please, more noise. I need a CD-ROM. I'm out of free hours. That's really interesting that a company owns it. I wouldn't even, like, the name?

Or, like, what? Any use? Like, clothing company use? Like, how do you watch that? How do you do it? Yeah. They have a trademark on it in Germany and then they're trying to do that in other countries. You can use Magenta to make stuff, but if you want your main company logo to be Magenta, like the way T-Mobile's logo is Magenta, they will sue you. And not just if you're a cell phone company. Wow. Yeah. yeah oh man i'm about to

get in hot water there's a bit of magenta on my podcast poster oh i didn't know anyone was gonna come after me i'm gonna get a cease and desist i'm gonna have to get some key in there cover it up this is a nightmare is it kind of like sport team colors like those are very specific like brand colors too or suit like coca-cola's red it's that kind of a red yeah very specific like print balance that like you know you can represent it numerically as a red you can patent that right like coca-cola doesn't own red they own that red so does the company own a magenta? Like that gets slippery, right? There's Yankee blue and it's not the same as like Cubs or Mets blue or whatever. Well, like, look how hard it is.

Even when you said, or Alex, when you had said T-Mobile and Caitlin and I were like, what? That's not magenta. So it's like, if somebody brings you to court and they're like, that's magenta. The argument's just, no, it's not.'s somebody brings you to court and they're like that's magenta what the argument's just no it's not i don't think so and it's like who can how are we to prove this it's like you know what i mean are we going to home depot to get the paint samples and we're just going to hold it up and see it's like right it sounds impossible to me it's literally looking at like

the value of the color that's weird and then it then it's like, oh, the monitor and a printer. We're right back to the weird world of like how different colors are. All comes back around to the can of or the jar of magenta that you're holding. It all comes back to the jar. Here she is. It is a weird idea. I mean, we patent so many odd things, ideas. Like they do get discovered.

Like they are inventions with specific like ingredients and formulas, but they are also a concept. It's just funny that it's both and that to attribute a formula to something named after a dude's pants is just a peculiar human habit. Yeah. Well, yeah, the sources here, the main source is an amazing piece for NPR by Darius Raffion. And there's also Mental Floss and Recode and a few other places. But when we're talking about like Coke trying to have red and stuff, it seems like Deutsche Telekom, which is T-Mobile and T-Systems, they're pretty uniquely successful at trademarking a color. Like even though Coke, I'm sure, has a specific red, you know, like craft and Netflix and stuff can use red too. It's not a problem. I was wondering if it was one of those things where if you bump the formula enough, uh, that it is not Coke's essentially adding one more

percentage or measure of red or yellow, or sorry, of yellow or a magenta when you're mixing it or printing it or representing it on screen changes it you know it changes it so minimally in our perception that it's still coke's red but it's also not and i wondered how specifically formulaic or if that's exactly why we don't trademark cutlers because they're too darn close right my cloppa clola can't be read with cursive. It could be like maroon with a handwritten font. Yeah, I'm not a Klopacola drinker. I'm a Pupsie drinker. That's me.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, great. Pupsie. Oh, God. We just spoke that into existence. And as far as I can tell, Deutsche Telekom has been able to successfully sue companies that did bump it a little bit, too. Wow. There's an official Pantone shade called Pantone Rhodamine Red U.

That is the official T-Mobile Deutsche Telekom one. But we'll talk about their lawsuits in a bit. They just really love magenta to the point where, like any store of theirs i've seen the building is magenta like on the inside they also built a website called love magenta.com where they call magenta the single most important element of their entire corporate brand and sell entirely magenta merchandise about it and then the ceo of the company is a guy named john leger who has only ever been seen in public wearing at least one piece of magenta. He also has custom made magenta sneakers. And in 2019, he dyed his hair magenta.

They are just, and also some of their subsidiaries in some countries are called Magenta Telecom. That's Austria's version of them, is Magenta Telecom. Some cults are really boring. Yeah. Yeah. They love it. magenta telecom some cults are really boring yeah yeah the most important element of your business you have employees brand you have human people working for you you have folks digging in minds to get the elements necessary to build your phone but no uh the concept of a color

those those soldiers pants it just hits you know that's what we think about and not like best reception or most fun phones or whatever. It's like magenta. That's the essence of our corporate brand is a color. Just to make a bet, I'm just going to say that Sprint's yellow is more distinct. Oh, wow. Just come for other phone brands based on their color. AT&T's blue.

Are you kidding me? The exquisite perfection of the there, not there AT&T's blue? Are you kidding me? The exquisite perfection of the there, not there AT&T blue. That gradient kiss from like gray blue to white blue across the new logo.

Perfect. I'm with AT&T and I can say it was exclusively because of the color choice. Right. The blue and I thought to myself, this is who I want to facilitate my communication

from here on in. So when I first got my first cell phone, it was singular wireless, which had, I think, an orange logo, because I liked that. And then AT&T ate them, and now I'm on AT&T. Yeah, it's all been color wars the whole time. But, and so Deutsche Telekom, they have proceeded to sue companies over this color, maybe partly because we're so drawn to it.

The lawsuit that makes the most sense is in 2014, AT&T launched a prepaid cell phone subsidiary called AO Wireless with what they called a plum logo. But it's kind of the same color, and Deutsche Telekom successfully sued them. And then from there, AT&T just shut down that whole operation. They were like, oh, we didn't get the color. Forget it. Done. Wow. Outrageous they shut the whole thing down.

They just rolled it into their other businesses and said, OK, forget it. Yeah. Like within a year. Do you think that was about trying to usurp magenta branding? That the sole purpose of like, you know, baiting that hook was just to see if they could win the lawsuit and take magenta? Yeah. As plum?

I can't prove it. And that's my read on it. Yeah. That seems to be what was going on. Man, now I feel bad for magenta. Remember the majesty of the name? I mean, a fight is brutal and like not maybe not the best part of human nature but i'm gonna give it more romanticism and drama than like

plum and magenta at a legal battle in a civil court somewhere that's uh perhaps an evolution in our non-violence but not in our futility we are still willing to engage in futile battles as a species, certainly. Yeah, I guess there's a lot of wars in this episode. But other lawsuits they've done, in 2008, they threatened to sue Engadget, which is a tech coverage website that had a Magenta logo. 2015, they sued German smartwatch maker Oxy. 2018, they sued a British data management software company called DataJar Limited. And then in 2019, they sued a US insurance company called Lemonade. And Lemonade's CEO fought with them in public. He said, quote, at some level, I knew it wasn't a joke, but it sure sounded like one you're talking about the

one of the three ink cartridges in every printer in the world end quote and then also like to cover all his bases he said also our logo's pink it's not magenta like he was he was trying to kind of well you know win every way he could yeah magenta's been a busy busy color my gosh all these lawsuits like yeah i wish i could get sued that many times it means i'm up to something like this is this is wild yeah this is absolutely wild i can't believe it like and and the investigating you have to do to track everybody down right because they're not even in the same field. Like, that's what I mean. I'm like, it's somebody's job to just scour the internet and like, look up, like find somebody using these colors. Like how are we even getting to this? Like, or do we have a button on the

internet in which you can report a color and then they get alerted of the report? Like, is that what's happening? I mean, my my goodness some terrible drop down in google like oh do you want to sue somebody seriously yeah exactly my goodness yeah wow is it just magenta or am i missing these stories about every color or every color that has some kind of other value. Like, did cyan have the same beef? Or is it just ginta? Yeah, like, is it all just pants-based? Are we getting some shirt colors in there? Are we getting a fanny pack in there?

Like, where are the colors coming from? Lynn, and so this kind of lawsuit, it seems like it only started happening in the 80s. Like, anybody doing this kind? And this Darius Raffion doing amazing reporting on it. He found a trademark attorney named Robert Zelnick. And that guy said, yes, you can functionally trademark a color if you can just keep winning these lawsuits. And the spark for people doing that is pink fiberglass insulation. Interesting. There's a company called Owens Corning that was started making their insulation pink. They did a whole ad campaign around it. They also paid for

the rights to the Pink Panther cartoon character from MGM to like help advertise it. And that's still their mascot today. And then they from their trademarks, pink insulation specifically, they successfully made it so nobody else can produce insulation that's pink because that's part of their thing. And so then from there, a bunch of other companies, including Deutsche Telekom, have attempted to do that too. And Deutsche Telekom, along with Tiffany Jewelry, and they're like Robin's Egg Blue. Those are the most successful, just pure trademarks of a color through litigation.

Wild. It's so weird. I have not been working hard enough. Let me tell you, I am in no lawsuits. I have no cool colors under my belt here. I got nothing going on. And that's a bummer because it sounds like these guys are really making moves and really making things happen. Right. If you're in court all the time, I guess you're winning. Like you're up to something and people

want it. That's what I'm saying. You're up to something. You know, there could be a movie about you like you don't know. You don't know. You don't get paid for those rights in prison. I am conflating civil and criminal court, but also if i'm getting sued i'm doing something illegal so i'm guessing that it's a little bit from column a little from column b everything from the spice rack going into my criminal endeavors just kidding no i'm

totally legal above board business license and everything what oh we got another soundbite and it seems like this kind of trademark is almost impossible to do. Like Deutsche Telekom is extremely rare in the whole legal world for this. We'll also have links about the Cadbury candy company trying to trademark that purple, like the eggs and stuff they do. They're really famous for it. And then in 2019, they lost. Like the court said, no, it's not totally yours. Other people can use it.

And Deutsche Telekom is, I think, basically always risking losing this, too, because if they keep going after everybody, eventually people might be like, no, other people can have some magenta some places. You don't own this chunk of the color world, you know? So strange. That's very funny. And I guess it would have to be like a primary color. I wonder if that purple, the issue was just too many brands had too many

purples close. Like, it seems like if you pick a color in a densely crowded area, you're not going to be able to single it out as your own. But if you go for the limiest lime green or like the most atrocious, like, you know, far end of the spectrum offensive to your eyes, you might be more likely to hold onto it. Like safety cone orange might be a pretty good brand choice because it's so unlikely to appear in other branding. Magenta is like one of those colors that's popular, but it's a bold choice for a brand and kind of a modern choice for a brand, sort of an internet-y choice for a brand uh if you got in early with that pink before it became more ubiquitous then i guess you have a better shot at keeping it but it seems like if

you're trying to get that game now yeah have to be like puce nobody's gonna fight for a dud color you know what i mean exactly like this guy's not worth it what are you nuts take him i don't want to take him off my hands please i hate this guy yeah that's i'm with i'm with you kaylin we gotta we gotta reset the bar in terms of what colors we want to associate with i'm gonna have to dig into some histories make sure i'm not you know inappropriately wearing some soldier's pants on the wrong day folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to caitlin gill and alana johnston for brightening my day with our fun taping about a bright color. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is shocking myths about magenta. There are more myths about magenta than you would think. How about that? Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show,

for a library of more than four dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the color magenta with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, magenta is an accidental side effect of the battle against malaria. Takeaway number two, the name magenta comes from the French pants in a battle near an Italian town. And takeaway number three, for trademark purposes, one company basically owns Magenta. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Caitlin Gill's stand-up

album is called Major. We'll have links for you to hear that and buy that. And then her t-shirt company is called Guarantee Shirts. I am wearing one as I tape this and it feels great. You're going to want them too. GuaranteeShirts.com or follow the episode link. And then Alana Johnston has a wonderful podcast called Self-Esteem Party that is on the Sonar Podcast Network. Just search the name Self-Esteem Party. The logo, as we described, very magenta. You'll see it. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great book that I really want you to check out. It's titled The Secret Lives of Color. It's by Kassia St. Clair. It's been a

useful source for every episode we've done so far about colors. And we've also probably talked about less than 1% of what is in there. Just an amazing piece of work. Tons of research, tons of stories, tons of ideas. Please check that out if you have any interest in where colors come from. Also, all those color episodes have many sources beyond Cassius St. Clair, this week is no different. One source is a great article from Smithsonian. It's by Aaron Blakemore, and it's called How Malaria Gave Us Mauve.

A great piece from JSTOR Daily by Allison C. Meyer. Amazing NPR stuff by Darius Raffion. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.