The zoologist Sir Edward Poulton wrote The Colours of Animals (1890) the first book describing camouflage in nature, and the American painter Abbott Thayer’s article The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration (1896) described schematised forms of common camouflaging found in nature such as countershading and disruptive coloration.

As blending-in, rather than standing-out, developed as a military tactic, camouflage in various forms emerged through a combination of research. Until the 18th century many military uniforms were purposely brightly coloured so as to be seen from afar by the enemy, but the British Army were the first to recognise the advantages of disguise when they began in 1850 to dye their otherwise bright white uniforms a sandy off-white colour designed to blend in with the desert calling these new uniforms khakis, a Hindu word for ‘dust’. Not surprisingly one of the most common uses for Chromium Oxide Green is in camouflage paint. George Field was also known for making this colour but it is unclear from his notes whether this was the hydrous transparent Chromium Oxide, sometimes known as Viridian, or the anhydrous Chromium Oxide associated with the highly opaque Chromium Oxide Green. In 1838 the artist-chemist Antoine-Claude Pannetier was the first to manufacture the Chromium Oxide pigment a method which would later be patented by Charles-Ernest Guignet in 1859.

Since the 1800s many inorganic pigments have been manufactured synthetically and Chromium Oxide Green is amongst those resulting from the scientific revolution during the 19th century which produced many synthetic dyes and pigments previously only found in nature as minerals (inorganic pigments) or sourced from carbon-based organism such as insects or plants (organic pigments). An uncanny feature of this rare mineral is the way its metallic vitreous green surface has a camouflaging moss-like appearance in the natural world. Chromium Oxide Green can be found in nature as Eskolaite, named after the Finnish geologist Pentti Eskola. In the pigment world one of the most stable green pigments is Chromium Oxide Green also known as Chrome Green. Many other species have also found ways of responding to this colour such as the walking-leaf-insect, which not only adopts the green colour of its environment but the very shapes and surface texture of leaves to achieve a perfect camouflage. To this day strong associations with green remain rooted deep in our DNA, and the word ‘green’ itself is an abbreviation for many concepts from living a ‘green’ healthy way of life or holding the political views of the ‘green’ party. However, what humans do have in common is a shared ability to recognise variations of green better than any other colour.Ī short explanation to this commonality is human evolution’s connection to our ancestral past and its predominantly green habitat where food or prey could be identified. This varies such as with colour blindness or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, with ‘tetrachromats’ rare individuals with a genetic mutation who can see up to 100 million colours.

The average number of colours humans can distinguish is around a million.

Chromium oxide