Buff (colour)

Buff is the pale yellow-brown colour of the un-dyed leather of several animals.

As an RYB quaternary colour, it is the darker colour produced by an equal mix of the tertiary colours citron and russet.

Etymology

The first recorded use of the word "buff" to describe a colour was in the London Gazette of 1686, describing a uniform to be "...a Red Coat with a Buff-colour'd lining". It referred to the colour of un-dyed buffalo leather, such as soldiers wore as some protection: an eye-witness to the death in the Battle of Edgehill (1642) of Sir Edmund Verney noted "he would neither put on armor or buff coat the day of the battle". Such buff leather was suitable for buffing or serving as a buffer between polished objects. It is not clear which bovine "buffalo" referred to, but it may not have been any of the animals called "buffalo" today.

Derived terms

The word "buff" meaning "enthusiast" or "expert" (US English) derives from the colour "buff", specifically from the buff-coloured uniform facings of 19th-century New York City volunteer firemen, who inspired partisan followers among particularly keen fire-watchers.

Buff

Buff or BUFF may refer to:

People

Given name

Surname

Film and television

Color

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space colors can be identified numerically by their coordinates.

Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).