A few months ago, I stumbled across Ian Frazier’s article about the enchanting color of the Statue of Liberty’s copper patina and I can’t get it out of my mind. Last night at 3:00 am I realized I could be sharing it with you and spread my obsession with this color, this story, and this “beguiling green.”
Benjamin Moore helped reproduce this color in a less dignified and romantic way than natural aging and exposure to the elements. Here’s a brief excerpt to get you intrigued:
“New Palace sells mostly Benjamin Moore paint, which had no factory-made color to match Magistro’s sample, so the eye of the store’s spectrophotometer read the sample, found a mixture of colors to duplicate it, and gave a formula. The formula was typed on the paint-spattered keyboard of a Gennex Fluid Management tinter, which then squirted the constituent colors—school-bus yellow, dark green, and black—into a can of oil-based white paint. Another machine shook the can to mix them. From there the new color began to spread across the Bronx.”
Read more here.
Illustration by Ben Wiseman
