Today we were given the most interesting challenge: we were asked to hunt down a shade from the year 1634! Well, as it turns out, we were in fact digging for gold, and X marks the spot on Gamboge, which is pronounced Gam-bohj, by drawling the O sound, with the O for the Ochre colour it is.

This morning Stephanie from Krafthaus contacted us to say that a Dutch client had specified one her felt products in the colour Gamboge, and could we please match it to the local Plascon chart? Gamboge? Gam-what? Stumped (and showing our ignorance) we went off to Wikipedia, and this is what the electronic encyclopedia had to say:

Gamboge (pronounced /?æm?bo??/ gam-bozh, /?æm?bo?d?/ gam-bohj or /?æm?bu??/ gam-boozh)[1] is a partially transparent dark mustard yellow pigment.[Note 1]

Gamboge is most often extracted by tapping resin from various species of evergreen trees of the family Guttiferae (also known as Clusiaceae), most often of the gamboge tree (genus Garcinia), including G. hanburyi (Cambodia and Thailand), G. morella (India and Sri Lanka), and G. elliptica and G. heterandra (Myanmar);[2] the orange fruit of Garcinia gummi-gutta (formerly called G. cambogia) is also known as gamboge[3] or gambooge.

The trees must be ten years old before they are tapped.[4] The resin is extracted by making spiral incisions in the bark, and by breaking off leaves and shoots and letting the milky yellow resinous gum drip out. The resulting latex is collected in hollow bamboo canes. After the resin is congealed, the bamboo is broken away and large rods of raw gamboge remain.

The first recorded use of gamboge as a color name in English was in 1634. [5]

We also got our hands on the RGB (B) values for gamboge: (228, 155, 15). From there we headed into Photoshop and created the colour by typing in the RGB codes. We then eye-matched various options and compared their RGB values… and Voila!

The closest match, other than custom-mixing an entirely new colour, is Plascon’s Beeswax Candle Y1-1-B1. Go gamboge go!