Purple bouquets: the colour a camera argues with
Someone photographs the bouquet, looks at the screen and says the flowers have come out blue. Nothing has gone wrong with the bouquet. Purple sits at the end of the visible range where phone sensors are least reliable, and the software that decides what the picture should look like tends to resolve the ambiguity towards blue.
Anyone who has tried to photograph lavender in a garden knows the effect already.
What the camera does with it
The shift is strongest on saturated violet under bright light, which is exactly the situation people photograph in. Deep purple loses its red side and comes back as a flat royal blue with no variation across the petal, and the veining that made the flower interesting in the hand disappears completely. Pale lilac survives much better. Automatic white balance makes it worse again, because the phone corrects for the largest light source in the frame and a warm room pushes everything cool in compensation. If the picture matters, it is worth taking one shot near a window in daylight and leaving the flash off.
There is a second problem in photographs, and it applies to mixed bouquets. Purple and burgundy read as the same tone once the image has been compressed, so a carefully built two-colour bunch arrives on the screen as a single dark mass.
The same colour in a room
Shade takes purple out first. Move the vase two metres from the window into the corner of a room and the flowers stop reading as purple at all, going brown or almost black, while the white flowers beside them lose nothing. It is a genuine property of the pigment and the low light, not a fault in the stems.
Lamp colour finishes the job. Under a warm bulb violet loses its blue component and settles into a dusty rose that most people describe as faded, and under cool white light it swings the other way and looks close to blue again.
Three things help, and none of them cost anything:
- A pale wall behind the vase. Purple needs something light to be seen against, and a dark shelf swallows it.
- A position within a metre or so of daylight, rather than the middle of the room.
- White or pale green flowers in the same bunch, which give the eye a reference and keep the purple from collapsing into the background.
Choosing on that basis
Purple bouquets work best where they will be seen in daylight: a desk by a window, a kitchen table, a shop counter. In a windowless hallway or a restaurant lit at dinner level, something lighter carries further and the money is better spent on white or soft pink.
Ask for the wrapping to be light, because grey and black paper look striking in a studio photograph and do the flowers no favours in an ordinary flat.
None of this is a reason to avoid the colour. It means only that the bouquet the recipient in Brussels shows their friends on a screen will not be quite the bouquet standing on their table. The one on the table is the better of the two.
