Was Ford colorblind in ’39?

Posted by Jive-Bomber on July 6, 2023 and filed under: Art & Inspiration

I’ve stated my love for automotive designer E.T. ‘Bob’ Gregorie with big respect for the styling of 1939-41 Ford, Mercury and Lincoln line up, in particular. I was admiring my friend Ken Gross’ 1940 Ford the other day and asked him what the coupe’s beautiful shade of green was called. “Cloud Mist Gray”, he sheepishly replied. Excuse me… Gray?! As in ‘a very light black’? How did Ford come up with that name for this obviously green hue when they introduced this color in 1939? Personally, I’ve never looked into the misty clouds above and somehow saw a light moss color. And just to make sure I’m not completely crazy, I looked up the definition of the word ‘gray’:

“Grey (more common in British English) or gray (more common in American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning literally that it is “without color”, because it can be composed of black and white.”

Then I looked up this specific Ford paint color by its more technical hex color code:

“Cloud Mist Gray: The hexadecimal color code #526763 is a medium dark shade of green-cyan.” Yeah. That doesn’t sound like a gray thing to me.

Even FoMoCo must have realized the error of their color-naming ways when they released ‘Harbor Gray’ just two years later in 1941, which was clearly based on a GRAY color, rather than another shade of green. Like I said earlier, this all started because it is a very beautiful color that caught my eye. I’ve always been a sucker blue and green paint colors from this era like Washington Blue, Brewster Green, and apparently, Cloud Mist Gray… Thanks to some colorblind marketing guy at Ford!