Just what color IS a radiant orchid?

Which one? It's a mystery to me. (Actually, I just pulled this picture out at random, as one that had colors that looked pretty close, but the one at the bottom left is Winterberry - I'm pretty sure that one's not actually orchid. The others... well.) (The other three are Eternal Beauty, Lotus, and Harmonie. More on that down toward the bottom.)

Pantone 18-3224 is what I've seen on swatches of the official color of the year, but Pantone's dirty little secret, near as I can tell, is that they announce the color of the year, but they don't really attempt to make anybody use that exact color. I suppose it would be impossible to do, for one thing. I've been watching this process for several years now and it's the same every year. This year, they put up a picture of an orchid on a red-violet sort of background - so which color is radiant orchid? the color of the orchid (and there's a couple to pick from there) or the color of the background? Nobody seems to know, or maybe the people who know are mostly not commenting.

One thing about it, this has drawn a lot of interest to the color orchid, and red-violet colors in general, which I think is Pantone's whole idea, and probably is why they don't just make it about Pantone 18-3224. (I said "dirty little secret" above like it was a bad thing, but really I don't think that. It gets them a lot of publicity, yes, but it also gets people thinking about color in general, and that's good.)

There's some color discussion below that is maybe a bit tl;dr long for people who aren't into this subject, but after that it's mostly links, and a polish list, so skip down to those if you just want to see the colors without reading more about this!


I've done a lot of thinking about color in general, in recent years - although I'm certainly no expert - and something I've been playing around with, in my head and on Pinterest and such places lately, is where the line is between purple and pink. It's pretty shifty, anyway, and orchid is somewhere in there, but I'm not entirely clear in my mind on where, either. (I think one of the links above had a picture of a sheet of various Pantone colors that are close. That's actually the most useful bit, to me.)

Anyway, in my head - and presumably on a color wheel - the progression through purple and into pink goes like this (and bear in mind that while I may put this in list form, it's actually more like a sliding scale. The points are not fixed.

• blue-violet
• neutral purples, that lean neither blue nor red
• red-violet
• magenta

and somewhere in there between red-violet and magenta, you start reading these colors as pink, especially if they're very pale. But the thing about orchids is that I've seen things all along this range be called orchid, all the way from blue-violet to awfully-pink, and in all kinds of intensities, too. So I still don't know the answer, assuming there even is one. But oh well, these kind of things make life interesting, right?

(I should qualify that: I don't have an answer but I do have an opinion, which is that orchid is on the paler end of this range of colors - although that may be where the "radiant" part comes from; maybe it's meant to imply a more intense color. Until I started paying attention to this in the last year or so I probably would have just called the darker red-violets "purple" but nowadays I'd be more likely to actually call them "red-violet," until they start shading into more magenta/pink tones, at which time I start calling them "fuchsia" or "hot pink" or something like that.)

Linkage:
First of all, Beauty Department did a whole post where it mostly looks like they did try to match the specific Pantone color I named above (and which is shown in the entry) - they came up with some things that I hadn't, at the time, like Zoya Charisma. (Charisma's been on my Zoya wishlist for a while, and I don't know why I still haven't gotten it.)

Here's some polish and makeup and other assorted items from several sources that I think is in the orchid/red-violet ballpark:
new Zoya Hudson (a gorgeous orchid shimmer, but apparently not yet available). Most spring lines seem to have an orchid - they'd be crazy not to! I know I saw a China Glaze picture somewhere also.
Zoya gives you several choices from their current lines - Perrie might be closest to the traditional idea of orchid, there.
Bobbi Brown Ultra Violet lip gloss
Orly Grape
Pantone iPhone cover and a "chip drive"
Laura Mercier Orchid eye stick

(Added: Huffington Post did a piece on this, too, and their examples are also all over the place.)

More late additions (I'll probably keep adding here as I come up with more examples):
Butter London Molly Coddled (they call it "opaque lavender orchid")

I also started pulling polishes out of my stash that I thought read as orchid or red-violet, and here's my list. (It's a pretty long list, so I'm not going to make any attempt at links here. If you don't want to google, you can look by brand in my labels list in the sidebar; I'm sure I've talked about most of these in the past year or so. Although bear in mind that the "orchid" in my label list is the brand, not the color; I need to go in and make that clearer.)

This list starts with the paler and redder colors - although you do have to bear in mind that I don't look good in pastels and I know it, so my palest is not terribly pale - and gets darker, more or less.

• Zoya Perrie, as mentioned above
• Julie G Crushed Candy (a "Gumdrops" texture)
• Zoya Kieko
• Chirality Convergence (holo)
• Confetti Purple Pizzazz (sheer, is really more of a topper)
• Zoya Harmonie (which is a frost - see picture above)
• Color Club Eternal Beauty (holo - also in picture)
• Zoya Lotus (which has a pretty neutral base but a shimmer that's more towards red)
• RBL Purple Haze (more greyed out and neutral)
• Revlon Ultraviolet Nail Art wand (not at all neutral, and not meant to be - this is in the Neon part of this line, though, and I had the impression they were discontinuing them)
• SH Xtreme Wear Posh Plum
• Sinful Colors Fig
• SOPI Domestic Goddess - discontinued, but I think the SOPIs have been seen around on clearance aisles, or virtual clearance aisles, and pretty recently
• Triple Shine Vanity Flare
• Zoya Mira
• Insta-Dri Grape Going - a duochrome
• Colorstay Amethyst
• Zoya Roxy - which is a glitter with a darker base but very red-violet glitter
• Kleancolor Sparkle Purple
• Zoya Carly - sort of like Jem's plummier sister! (I love Jem but it's too brown for this list)
• Revlon Plum Attraction (probably the darkest in this bunch)

(Added: I was looking at Revlon's website just now, trying to figure out if Plum Attraction is a current color - I suspect not, and I haven't found it so far if it is - but I did notice that Nail Art Neons are still listed as a line, so I may be wrong about Ultraviolet. What's not listed any more is Moon Candy, another of the Nail Art lines.)