Ronald Reagan doesn’t dye his hair — he’s just prematurely orange.
Gerald Ford
The fruit came before the colour. The word “orange” derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as “narange” in the 14th century, gradually losing the initial “n”. This process is called wrong word division and also left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere). Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.
Oranges are unknown in the wild. They are a hybrid of tangerines and the pomelo or “Chinese grapefruit” (which is pale green or yellow), and were first cultivated in south-east Asia. They weren’t orange, but green, and Vietnamese oranges and Thai tangerines are still bright green on the outside and orange inside.
So how have they ended up giving their name to a colour? It’s because oranges are a subtropical, not tropical fruit. The colour of an orange depends on where it grows. In more temperate climes, its green skin turns orange when the weather cools; but in countries where it’s always hot, the chlorophyll is preserved and the fruit stays green.
How ripe is my orange?
You can’t tell the ripeness of an orange by its colour, no matter where it’s from. If an orange is unpicked, it can stay on the tree until the next season, during which time fluctuations in temperature can make it turn from green to orange and back to green again without the quality or flavour being affected.
Orange juice
Although its origins are in south-east Asia, the first New World orange trees were planted in Florida in 1513 by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León.
Brazil now grows a third of all oranges in the world, of which 85 per cent are used for juice. Brazil’s Cutrale company produces one glass in five of all the orange juice drunk in the world. You don’t see it on packaging as it exports the concentrate, which is then turned into juice and listed as a product of the importing country.
It takes 50 glasses of water to grow enough oranges to make one glass of orange juice.
Orange hair
Alexander the Great washed his hair in saffron to keep it a lovely shiny orange colour. During his time saffron was as rare as diamonds and more expensive than gold.
Orange birds
Canaries were originally a mottled greeny-brown, but 400 years of crossbreeding by humans produced their yellow colour. A diet of red peppers turns them orange.
Orange brands
Flymo, the hover lawnmower, was originally blue and only turned orange in 1977. This was in response to consumer research that claimed it made it easier to find in long grass. Orange, the telecom company, was founded in 1994. Brand consultants Wolff Olins developed the orange square to emphasise the colour, rather than the fruit. They drew on the Chinese aesthetic discipline of feng shui, in which orange is the colour of purpose and organisation, and is supposed to help focus concentration. In the same year, advertising agency WCRS came up with the tag line: “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.”
Less than a year later, airline easyJet launched with orange livery.
New Orange
New Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch in 1653, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, then retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and renamed New Orange. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English and New York became its permanent name.
Orange boxes
The black box flight recorders on aircraft are actually bright orange so that they can be found more easily. They were originally called “black boxes” because early electronic prototypes were stored in black metal boxes.
Orange punishment
In Spanish, anaranjear means, literally, to “orangicate” – to pelt something with oranges.