The Purple Manifesto: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the Color Spectrum

There’s a certain madness that creeps in around the edges when you start talking about purple. Not the sanitized, corporate purple of tech company logos or children’s dinosaurs, but the raw, throbbing purple of a desert sunset after too many days on the road and not enough sleep.

I’ve seen what purple can do to a person’s mind. Watched perfectly reasonable art critics dissolve into babbling wrecks at the sight of a Rothko’s violet depths. The Romans understood this – they reserved purple for their emperors, knowing full well that common men couldn’t handle that kind of chromatic power without losing their grip on reality.

Let’s be brutally honest here: any color that comes from crushing thousands of sea snails is operating on a different level of consciousness than your garden variety pigments. Blue? Please. Blue is what accountants see when they look up at the sky during their lunch breaks. Red is what insecure men paint their midlife crisis cars. But purple… purple is what happens when the universe decides to show off.

I spent three days in a hotel room in Vegas staring at a purple wallpaper pattern until it started speaking in tongues. The hotel manager later claimed there was no purple wallpaper in the entire building. This is what we’re dealing with here, people.

The facts are clear, even if they’re uncomfortable: purple is the color of royalty, of psychedelic enlightenment, of bruises earned in the pursuit of truth. It’s the last visible color in the spectrum before reality breaks down into ultraviolet and mathematical abstractions. Anyone who tells you different is probably working for the yellow lobby, and God help them for that.

Buy the ticket, take the ride. Just make sure it’s painted purple.