Mark Buffa, the Club’s webmaster and color expert at General Motors has the following comments on comparing colors through computer pictures.

Alan, What you are proposing is going to be a difficult task. Everyone sees color and color differences differently due to the makeup of their retina and it changes over time, especially in males who are more sensitive to reds as they get older. One would need a person trained in color evaluation to do this correctly and consistently. One would also need the proper equipment to view the color. This would include a color light booth with various light sources and filters and the proper neutral gray backgrounds and clothes for viewing the pieces. Transparent colors are even more difficult than opaque. They have both a both a reflectance and a transmittance part to their color and variation in thickness can drastically change the color position. There is also the issue with variations in the glass formula due to chemical source and processing. Matching color to formula is going to be difficult unless the person understands chemistry. There are many reactions happening in the making of glass including reduction and oxidation where they would have to understand the final state of the glass and if the metal colorant is substitutional in the glass polymer matrix or interstitial as an ion between the glass matrix and to what oxidation state they are. An example is copper. It can be blue, two shades of green, and even a ruby, depending upon which oxidation state it is in. There is also the volatility of the colorants as the temperatures used in making the glass. What is in the glass formula initially is not always what it left in the glass. I know Greg Merkle, Marshall Ketchum, myself and a few others can understand this but not sure how much of the rest of club can. In regards to June?s medium blue jade. Several pieces and shaped exist and they all seem to pop up on the west coast. It appears to be a jade base on a copper blue like Celeste so a name of Celeste Blue Jade was given to it awhile ago so that others could understand what the color position was. I will see if I can put together a color page with this blue. The color? Smoke? was produced at the same time the moonlight, pale amethyst, and pale green as there are many items listed as being made in these colors. Smoke is also found in combination with French Blue. The best way to describe this color would be a bluish gray Rosa. There are already several pieces in the database so I should be able to make a page for this color also. The pink Florentia is actually called Cinnamon Florentia. It looks to be a Rosa type color cased over an opal glass like flint white. It is the same color that is used in the paperweight colognes and the ball connectors with the colored ribbons and mica in them. Don?s blue is more than likely Marina, but without a picture and a shape number for referencing it would be difficult to tell. As for the variation in Flemish names, they probably refer to the concentration of cobalt used in them and the hardness of the glass formula. Hard glass is difficult to cut they might have been distinguished that way but this is conjecture.MarkEditorial note. While color discussion is going on and pictures are being posted on a web site for interaction, you should note that the Club maintains a web site with a color section which is adding to its base of information as abstracted in part from these discussions.