Black has meant mourning, formality, rebellion and luxury at different times and in different cultures — its meaning has always depended heavily on context rather than being fixed.
No single HEX value defines this entire colour family — see individual colour profiles below for specific shades.
Black has also long signalled formality and authority in Western dress, from clerical and judicial robes to modern formal eveningwear and business attire.
Western
Black became the dominant mourning colour in much of Western Europe and North America, strongly reinforced by Victorian-era mourning customs in 19th-century Britain.
Western Europe and North America · 19th century
In 20th-century subcultures, black clothing has also signalled rebellion or countercultural identity (for example in punk fashion), showing how the same colour can carry very different meanings within one culture over time.
20th century
Black is one of the most widely used colours in modern minimalist branding and premium product design, often associated with sophistication and simplicity.
General
Black paint is carbon, and carbon is what burning leaves behind. Lampblack is soot from burning oil, close to pure carbon. Bone black is charred animal bone, of which only about a tenth to a fifth is carbon, the rest being the mineral of the bone itself. Both have been in use since prehistoric times. Painters did not always use them alone: in the two paintings cited below, analysis found black combined with blues, earths and a yellow to steer its tone. The same principle, absorbing as much light as possible, is now pursued by engineering instead of burning, in coatings built from aligned carbon nanotubes. 1, 2, 3
| Name | Kind | Period | What is known | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lampblack | Pigment | prehistoric times onward | Soot, sometimes carrying traces of unburned material. One of the oldest pigments known. | 1 |
| Bone black | Pigment | prehistoric times onward | The dark background of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is a layer of it with a second layer containing weld, chalk, a little red ochre and indigo. | 2 |
| Ivory black | Pigment | prehistoric times onward | The principal pigment of the men's black clothes in Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens, modified with cobalt blue and an orange-brown ochre. | 4 |
| Mourning crêpe | Cloth | 19th century | A crimped, matte black fabric, hand-woven in Italy for the wealthy and machine-embossed in volume for everyone else. Little survives, partly because keeping it in the house after mourning was thought unlucky. | 5 |
| Vantablack | Coating | 2014 | A forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that traps light between them, absorbing 99.965% of what falls on it. A still blacker material has since been reported. | 3 |
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old English period | England | The usual word for black was sweart; blæc, the ancestor of 'black', sat confusingly close to blac, which meant pale or shining. | 6 |
| 1635 | England | The Judges' Rules prescribed a black robe faced with miniver as the winter dress of a judge. | 7 |
| 1665 | — | Vermeer used bone black for the background of Girl with a Pearl Earring. | 2 |
| 1846 | England and Wales | The newly created County Courts adopted the plain black gown. | 7 |
| About 1885 | London | Jay's General Mourning Warehouse of Regent Street made a black silk satin dress, plain but fashionably cut, probably for a later stage of mourning. | 8 |
| 2014 | Britain | Surrey NanoSystems developed a nanotube coating that was, at the time, the blackest material known. | 3 |
Claim: English judges wear black because the bench went into mourning for a monarch and never came out of it.
Evidence: Not supported by the judiciary's own history. It records black as the regulation winter robe in the rules of 1635, black silk gowns on some judges in civil trials by the mid-18th century and on the Chancery judges before the 1870s, and it attributes the modern spread of black to which courts were merged into which. Royal mourning is not mentioned. 7