There is a specific green color you have never seen on a monitor. There may be a way to approximate it that I don’t know of, but unfortunately I just don’t have any way of showing it to you here. Here is where I have seen it:

- certain particularly green turquoises;
- emeralds cut so as to sit right on the boundary of transparent and translucent;
- A shallow inlet over coarse white sand seen from a height;
- One of the colors in a Paas easter-egg dye kit;
- Copper let to patinate in saltless air.

I’ve always regarded this with a sort of aesthetic familiarity for no particular reason – odd in that, within its own region of our visual spectrum, I tend to prefer darker rather than lighter colors. And because the easter-egg association is the only one I have significant personal experience with – and because it’s been a decade since I’ve colored an egg – there’s a certain nostalgia to its appeal.

As it turns out, the appeal and nostalgia and my inability to just link you to the color have a specific, shared reason: It is outside of the RGB gamut. You can produce it with no standard color monitor. For computerized design (which on the balance I prefer), it is well outside of the toolbox – and as such, most people capable of finding work in graphic design have not used it since the 80s. Not only is it impossible to view on a monitor (and I’ve been glued to one since age 3), it’s impossible to work with on a computer.

To sift through humanity’s intellectual output such as it has been for the last five or so years, one would find vanishingly little evidence that the color was known to us at all.