Red is one of the earliest colours humans learned to produce reliably, from prehistoric ochre through to some of the most expensive and most dangerous pigments ever made.
No single HEX value defines this entire colour family — see individual colour profiles below for specific shades.
Red ochre is among the oldest pigments used by humans, found in archaeological sites tens of thousands of years old, well before organised agriculture.
prehistory
Vermilion, made from the mineral cinnabar, was prized in antiquity for its intensity but contains mercury — one of the earliest widely-documented cases of a beautiful pigment carrying a real health hazard.
antiquity
Cochineal red, extracted from an insect native to the Americas, became one of the most valuable traded goods after European contact with the continent, prized for producing a vivid, durable red dye.
Americas and Europe · 16th century onward
Red has repeatedly been used as an official or military colour — from Roman military cloaks to the British army's historical redcoats — likely valued in part for high visibility and morale association.
Rome and Britain
In modern branding and digital design, red remains one of the most commonly used colours for urgency, warning and call-to-action elements, building on its long-standing warning/alert associations.
General
Red has been within reach for longer than any other strong colour because iron-rich earth lies almost everywhere. Every brighter red, though, needed a different and dearer source: a mercury mineral, a plant root, or scale insects found on either side of the Atlantic. The English vocabulary of red is largely a list of those sources. 'Vermilion' named cinnabar and the paint ground from it, 'crimson' goes back to the Arabic name of the kermes insect, and 'scarlet' was a fine cloth before it was a colour. The basic word is older than all of them: Old English read covered shades we would now separate as purple, crimson, scarlet and pink, and it is the one colour word for which a common Indo-European root has been securely reconstructed. 1, 2
| Name | Kind | Period | What is known | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red ochre | Pigment | prehistory to the present | An earth coloured by the iron oxide haematite. Yellow ochre turns red when heated, so one could be made from the other. | 2 |
| Madder | Dye | antiquity onward | A root whose colouring agents are alizarin, purpurin and pseudopurpurin; used on textiles and, bound to a mineral base as a lake, in paint. | 3 |
| Kermes | Dye | ancient times onward | An Old World insect red. Analysis has found it in the Magdalen's dress in Titian's Noli me Tangere (about 1514) and in Delilah's crimson satin in Rubens's Samson and Delilah (1609). | 4 |
| Cochineal | Dye | from as early as 700 BC in the Americas | A scale insect, Dactylopius coccus, that lives on cacti. It was dyeing textiles in the Americas many centuries before the export trade to Europe began in the 16th century. | 5, 6 |
| Vermilion (cinnabar) | Pigment | antiquity onward; the English word from the late 13th century | Mercury sulfide, mined as cinnabar or manufactured. Brilliant, but known to darken considerably in some paintings. | 7, 1 |
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| About 100,000 years ago | Blombos Cave, South Africa | An ochre-rich mixture was left in abalone shells beside the tools that made it — prepared colour, long before any painting that survives. | 8 |
| As early as 700 BC | The Americas | Cochineal was already being used to dye cloth. | 5 |
| Late 13th century | England | 'Vermilion' is recorded in English for cinnabar and the red made from it; the adjective for the colour follows only in the 1580s. | 1 |
| Early 15th century | England | 'Crimson' arrives as cremesin, a cloth dyed deep purplish-red, borrowed from Italian with the silks that carried the colour. | 1 |
| 1609 | — | Rubens rendered Delilah's satin robe chiefly in carmine from kermes insects. | 4 |
| 2005 and 2024 | — | A short paper reported that Olympic combat-sport contestants in red won more often; the same authors' later analysis of 6,589 contests found 50.5% of wins in red, no significant bias. | 9, 10 |
Claim: Wearing red helps you win.
Evidence: No longer supported as a general effect. The 2005 finding held for the competitions then studied, but the 2024 meta-analysis across seven Olympic Games and nine world boxing championships found no significant advantage overall. There was some support in close contests before 2005 (56.8% won in red), and the authors suggest rule changes and awareness of the effect may have removed it. 10, 9