Color your World : Chestnut

Chestnut is a color, a medium reddish shade of brown(displayed right), and is named after the nut of the chestnuttree.

Indian red is a similar but separate and distinct color fromchestnut.

Chestnut is also a very dark tan that almost appears brown.

The name chestnut derives from the color of the nut of the chestnut tree. The first recorded use of chestnut as a color term in English was in 1555.

Deep chestnut is the color called chestnut in Crayola crayons. This color was also produced in a special limited edition in which it was called Vermont maple syrup.

At the request of educators worried that children (mistakenly) believed the name represented the skin color of Native Americans, Crayola changed the name of their crayon color “Indian Red”, originally formulated in 1958, to “Chestnut” in 1999. In reality, the color Indian red has nothing to do with American Indians but is an iron oxide pigment the use of which is popular in India.