YELLOW

A CRAYON BY ANY OTHER NAME

Crayola’s decision to weed out Dandelion from its collection will limit us profoundly,

Rose Zgodzinski writes

This year, on National Crayon Day in the United States, Crayola Inc. announced that the crayon named Dandelion would be retiring. If Crayola actually follows through on this announcement and weeds Dandelion out of the box, that would leave the standard 24-crayon package with just one yellow-coloured crayon - Amarillo. What is Amarillo you ask? It is Spanish for yellow. Now that seems like a pretty straightforward, well-appointed name for a yellow, but I am suspicious that this generic handle may be foreshadowing that Amarillo could become the only yellow.

Though it may seem like a dream job, I imagine that naming colours must be extremely hard work and somewhat of a thankless job given all the yellow Crayola names that have fallen by the wayside in the past decade alone; Super Happy, Sunshine Sprite, Parmesan, Lemon Glacier, Gold Bunny Gold and Enchanted Forest (a yellow green colour). I feel for the crayon-naming team, which must have spent considerable grey matter thinking of all these names for yellow.

I am clearly blue leaning in the way I perceive the world; by this I do not mean my overall mood or where I would reside on the American political map. It is the part of the spectrum where I feel relief and support at the same time. Open my closet and the vibrating turquoise-to-indigo clothing spectrum reveals everything that needs to be said about my colour comfort zone. Yet even though I live in the blue world almost exclusively, I think that really eliminating a yellow, any yellow, from the spectrum is a big mistake, although this is unlikely to happen given Crayola's history.

I have done a bit of research and although my understanding of Crayola's marketing strategy may be limited, I have discovered what can only be described as some colour naming hanky-panky.

The Globe & Mail, July 12, 2017 Illustration credit: Wenting Li