Why We Do This: Spray paint collecting explained in three colors.
By JoeWelcome CMC
Rarity is so regularly thrown about these days. It’s common now that a product is short-run specifically to become a collector’s item, a manufactured and deliberate scarcity being part of its commercial allure from the beginning. There’s nothing quite like something sold with “Collector’s Item” literally printed on it, and words such as “rare”, “limited”, and “grail” are simply tossed into every online sale almost as a rule. It’s worth noting that we live in a world where physical items are themselves dwindling in number as digital and intangible things seemingly replace them—in other words, if it’s actually a physical object now, it’s already a collector’s item. Let’s push such issues of modernity aside and ponder this: what was truly rare before the internet age, before the walkman age, or prior to the television age?
The color Purple was rare, if not the color of rarity itself (or should it be herself?). Despite being one of the secondary colors of the color wheel, it appears the least frequently compared to its neighbors green and orange. Purple has long been a deliberately rare quantity. It was long identified as the color of royalty, wealth, luxury, and exclusivity, a hue not to be wasted on the common, vulgar, or pedestrian. You clearly only used Purple when it was appropriate. Conversely, it was also the color of otherness at numerous times in history, as marginalized groups had been tagged with Purple to denote them “not of the majority” (see also pink, of course). The color Purple is simply problematic, it just wants to start trouble, or perhaps lord over everybody else. It’s a color unafraid of waste, happily existing merely to be in a show of flamboyance. Spray paint collectors themselves know the particular tingle on their spine when finding a can of Purple. Purple, even in the 1970s, was a color many brands never manufactured out of simple logic and reason. Outside of our particular niche, how many people find themselves requiring Purple spray paint? Until the US Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was signed into law in December of 1970, most brands didn’t even manufacture the color at all. The OSHA Act created worker safety standards for the workplace, most notably for the paint collector the assigning of colors to certain workplace hazards. Krylon, who made a broad range of greens, blues, and oh-so-many yellows, only made two Purples for many years: Safety Purple (aka Plum) and the legendary Icy Grape. The muted and always desirable Icy Grape was always rare because most stores didn’t bother carrying it, and some that did have reported to us that it hardly ever sold. Not enough aristocracy shopping at the paint store in the 1970s, we guess. Rust-Oleum only made Federal Safety Purple because they had to as an industrial paint manufacturer, but it was limited in sprays to a 1972-1979 timeframe and then after mostly appeared in an industrial-only form.
The OSHA Act’s guidelines coded Purple appropriately obscure—for indicating radiation hazards. As paint brands usually produced all eight colors stipulated under OSHA, one has to wonder exactly how many radiation hazards could there be? Outside of the Purples produced to coincide with federal regulations, the remaining purples seemed to grasp upon the exoticism OR eroticism of the color itself. Wet Look went lascivious with Purple Passion, Wet Paint had Loving Purple, Decrolon invented something called Zambesi Purple, Illinois Bronze issued Purple Panther and Perky Purple, and a few brands produced Wild Iris or Wild Orchid. In the midst of it all, Flecto attempted to be sober with Proper Purple, but we doubt it was the life of the party, and a smattering of more conservative Lavenders and Violets also appeared. And as was usually the case, most of these colors were killed off in the 1980s, with a few holdouts such as Zynolyte’s Touche and Plasti-Kote Polyurethane producing purple shades. The ‘90s saw a few Grapes being issued as Krylon and Rust-Oleum came back to purple, but only very conservatively.
Purple spray paint was nearly a vanity project, an additional way to position your brands as culturally hip, unafraid of fashion, totally boss. As colors go, perhaps none is as tropical or bewildering, as Purple was a phenomenon though a very limited one– but seems like that’s the kind of tease the decadent Purple wanted all along.
