What’s Wrong With Cerulean, Anyway?

Iris was the daughter of the gods, Thaumas of the blue sea and Thaumas' ocean-nymph wife, Electra. She chose as her mission, color, because the sky was black and, of all the emergencies the other gods addressed, she felt the dark sky was the most critical.

She tried to paint the sky, jumping so high that when she came back down, she had left a streak in that dark night, a multicolored band--an arc of variegated ribbon.

Thus she became known as the goddess of the rainbow.

But even a thousand rainbows could not prevent the black from bleeding through. So she jumped so high that she found a green star in the night and pushed it to the world. But the sky turned green, which made all of the lush gardens invisible. She jumped again, so high, that she found a red star in the night and pushed it together with the green star.

"Oh, no," she lamented, for the sky was yellow, and when she jumped along it the streaks of her rainbows were only brown. "A yellow sky just won't do, nor will brown rainbows!" she complained. She jumped yet again, so high, and was able to locate a blue star and tether it, pulling it into the star that was the combined red and green.

The sky became bright, blinding white. She made another arc, but the colors of its rainbow were completely overwhelmed by the brightness of the white. "Who wants to live their lives with eyes closed?" she grumbled.

She had an idea. She looked about the blinding landscape and removed everything brown she could see. She removed the bark of the trees, the stink from the shit, and the mush from all mushrooms. The sky darkened somewhat, but was now gray.

She looked about the bland, dull, muted landscape and removed everything red she could see. She ate all of the apples, picked all of the roses, and coagulated any blood there was into dark scabs. She looked up at the sky and saw it was cerulean. "Almost," she huffed.

She wondered about the green now. She wondered about removing the chlorophyll from the grass, the emeralds from the black shale and from ladies, and the hate from envy. But surely if she removed all the green, she calculated, she would be left with only a pure blue, which would wash out the blue in her rainbow, making each look like two--one of red, orange, yellow, and green, and another of indigo and violet.

"That not the way I will have my rainbows," she said. "Cerulean will have to do."

And she rested, for she saw that it was good.

MORAL OF THE STORY: If you live by the color wheel, don't look for complements when you're searching for rainbows.