Going Green

 What would you say is your favourite colour?

It was the sort of question asked of mullet haired footballers in the pages of "Shoot" in the 1970’s and a mainstay of personal character questionnaires in the pig tailed Bunty, pop inspired Jackie and adolescent Blue Jeans, those popular teen comics for young girls and secretly read by sibling brothers when no one was in the house. 

The answers are likely to have varied even for the same respondent because of the close association that colours have with mood, season, relationships, fashion and trends. 

Primary colours are of course the most commonly cited usually with the image of a rainbow conjured up in the minds eye. 

Gender is also a strong determining factor with deeply rooted traditions from our earliest years along the lines of blue for boys and pink for girls. 

Of course, times have changed blurring the former boundaries of sex and gender and amazingly we now also have a colour range extending into the millions of tones and shades.

That question of favourite colour is no longer capable of a quick, reflex answer. 

The Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire based but global paper manufacturing company of G F Smith have just revealed, as part of the year long City of Culture celebrations on their home patch, the results of an extensive customer poll to find the world’s favourite colour. 

Over their 132 years of business in paper G F Smith do have the clout and coverage to at least give some credibility to seek out such a big answer. 

Their own range of products is a riot of colour and so the winner of the survey may come as a bit of a surprise or disappointment although there can be no denying the outcome determined by thousands of people spanning 100 countries worldwide. 

It is a rather understated teal-ish shade called Marrs Green. 

As part of a Pop-Up installation by G F Smith on Humber Street in the heart of the Culture Zone for Hull’s momentous status the winning colour was displayed to great prominence but personally I was a bit underwhelmed and indeed found it hard to believe that a greenish shade held so much affection across the globe.

However, there was something very familiar and warming about a green shade and then I realised why. The iconic colour of the Italian bike maker, Edoardo Bianchi.

The origins of the 129-year-old Italian company's distinctive celeste colour are a bit of a mystery. 

Pantone PMS 332 C

Over the decades the stories behind it get more glorified and less truthful but then again such is the way of legends and fables.  

One theory is that as part of a commission to make a bike for the Italian Queen the master builder chose the colour to match her eyes.

 Another is that a job lot of surplus military paint after the first world war was acquired and what is likely to have been a predominant camouflage spectrum toned down to something brighter. 

This latter idea has been questioned in that advertising material for Bianchi from before 1914 already referred to celeste as a favoured colour. 

In its earliest years celeste was more of a sky blue than its current minty green and some have attributed this to the colour of the sky above the Via Nirone workshops of the company in Milan, Italy. 

I can ,from my love affair with the images of Bianchi bikes in films and photos from classic cycle races such as the Tours of Italy, France and Spain, appreciate how a single and at face value inanimate colour can evoke deep feelings. 

That Marrs Green, after all, is not too bad.