The bad vibes of lemon chiffon.

Art I like, a color I don't.

I just… did not want to open with cake. I’m not in a sweet mood, okay? (Potatoes in a Yellow Dish, Vincent van Gogh, 1888.)

Was it coincidence or was it nominative destiny? Either way, his name was Henry Baker, and this was his legacy: a fluffy, lighter-than-light, pale yellow cake. The year was 1927 and Baker had, according to the New York Times, “abandoned a wife and child in Ohio to make a new life in Hollywood,” which I suppose wasn’t going that well, considering how much time he had to “fiddle obsessively” in his California kitchen. Eventually, he settled on a recipe that was a huge hit with his neighbors and friends, and Baker sold his makes from the front porch for $2 a pop (equivalent to around $35 in today’s cash). He was able to charge a premium because no one else could make a cake quite like that, and for decades, he held tight to the secret of chiffon.

It was hard to choose a single Thiebaud painting for this. And honestly… I sort of hate them all. It’s ugly, right? (Two Wedding Cakes, Wayne Thiebaud, 2015.)

It was General Mills that finally cracked the baker. In 1947, he sold his recipe to the company, and they told the general public in a Betty Crocker pamphlet. Chiffon was hailed as the “first new cake in 100 years” and naturally, it became a must-make for many women. Soon enough, housewives across the country were being begged to pull out the KitchenAid and whip up their own butterless bake. Although this is a bit besides the point for a Color Story, I want to quote Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork here, since it nicely encapsulates how technology, food trends, and domestic labor intertwine:

Another problem with the labor-saving devices aimed at women is that they have always come along at the same time as a rise in culinary expectations, so the net result was a cook who was more exhausted than ever… It would not be until the electric mixers of the twentieth century that beating eggs became radically easier. The early patent eggbeaters, by contrast, brought only the illusion of ease, coupled with a sense that producing perfectly beaten eggs was something that women ought to do, and a woman in possession of a Dover felt obliged to make fancy cakes with it. The popularity of these whirligigs also corresponded to a new vogue for angel food cakes, which necessitated huge volumes of eggs to be beaten, the whites and the yolks separately. So far from halving a woman’s work, this latest, greatest mechanism could actually multiply it.

Now this? This, I like. (Maternité aux fleurs, Le Pho, 1995.)

I’ve never baked a chiffon, so I can’t attest to how much labor it requires. It certainly sounds fussy to me, but again: I’m a just weeknight mom cook, in the kitchen out of necessity. I occasionally bake from boxed mixes when my daughter wants dessert. (My own cravings tend salty.) For all these reasons, my lemon chiffon isn’t a cake. It’s a color.

“Lately I have been having dreams about spoiling a painting by trying to make it better. In this dream, I have repainted a piece of fruit and it’s gone wrong. It is a very negative dream and it’s lovely to find when I wake up in the morning that I haven’t spoilt it at all.” More good stuff here. (Still Life with Amaryllis and fruit on a chair, Mary Fedden, 1980.)

What shade is it, exactly? I think it’s close to butter yellow, though with less cream in the recipe. It’s not quite as bright as saffron, nor is it as pigmented as the standard lemon yellow, but it feels closer to these hues than it does to ivory. Butter may be an off-white, but lemon chiffon is not. It’s a true, sunny yellow, a childish, springtime color. It’s decadent in the homespun way of an upscale country bed and breakfast. It brings to mind fluffy baby chicks and worn flannel blankets, grandma’s quilts and brunch with hollandaise. Unlike champagne yellow, which glimmers and glints with late night secrets and wedding guest debauchery, lemon chiffon is a daytime color, a churchgoers hue. It’s a bit cloying, and rather retro. I don’t think I like it.

I love Hodler so much—I really love the symbolist painters in general. Dreamy paintings feel truer to life than photo-realistic ones. They better reflect what it is to be alive in this strange world with its yellow dawns. (Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc at dawn, Ferdinand Hodler, 1918.)

On one hand, lemon chiffon is pretty, and I like pretty things. On the other, lemon chiffon is pastel and passé, too sweet for my teeth. I do like daffodils and farmhouse decor, but I don’t really enjoy Easter and I get squirrely around too much nostalgia. I suppose it’s just one of those colors that I like in nature but wouldn’t want to wear. I certainly wouldn’t want this color on the walls of my house—I’ve made that mistake before.

That yellow line of the windowsill… that’s what makes this painting! (Flowers in front of a Window, Henri Matisse, 1922.)

Lemon chiffon, light and bright, looked good on the paint swatch. And it looked nice when I began painting. I was in high school and it was the first time I had ever undergone a project like that. It wasn’t until the paint dried that I began to understand my mistake. What looked creamy and soft as a sample was searing, overwhelming, like staring directly at a sickly February sun. I felt like the narrator from The Yellow Wallpaper, creeping, creeping around my own bedroom, watched always by that too-vivid hue. It wasn’t any better at night; in fact, the yellow became worse then.

“The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fashion exhibit, Sleeping Beauties.

Perhaps I’m being too negative. One bad decor decision shouldn’t spoil a perfectly good color. If I had been born in the 19th century, I probably wouldn’t have such negative feelings about light yellow. Back then, buttery soft daffodil shades were all the rage in American and European fashion. “What we consider flattering today is often not what was considered flattering historically,” writes textile historian Leimomi Oakes, who points out that yellow often has the effect of “washing out” a complexion (i.e. making one look pale). “But up until the 1920s, lighter, paler, and less tanned was better. Yellow is often cited as a flattering colour in 19th century fashion literature, when tanning was definitely not the thing.” Back then, it was cool to look consumptive, a little bit wan. Light hues like primrose and jonquil were advised for day dresses, but so were darker, brighter yellows—mustard, lemon, ochre. This also happened to be when synthetic dyes were taking off, which meant there was suddenly a wider range of yellow available to consumers. Before, most yellows came from weld (aka “dyer’s weed”) but in 1818, “chrome yellow” entered the lexicon, thanks to the work of French chemist Louis Nicolas Vauquelin. The pigment was made with lead, so it was hardly healthful, and while it fell out of use relatively quickly, it remains part of our shared iconography thanks to Van Gogh. His series of sunflower paintings—which Gauguin rather sweetly called “completely Vincent”—positively glow with chrome yellow.

I really love how he paints the back of the sunflowers, the little wisps of greenery. (Sunflowers, fourth version, Vincent van Gogh, 1888.)

Aside from Van Gogh, not that many artists love yellow. Not that many people do, period. Out of the primary colors, people tend to prefer blue and red. I’m guessing this has to do with our sense of disgust; illness is often yellow. Snot, discharge, pus, jaundice, even that gross yellow film that some people get on their tongues. Blue has no such associations, and while blood is red, it doesn’t ooze. We hate things that ooze. Viscosity is a real problem for our repulsion reflex. Even Goethe, who wrote his philosophical treatise, Theory of Colours, back in 1810, admitted that yellow is “extremely liable to contamination, and produces a disagreeable effect if it is sullied.”

This is almost lemon chiffon, though perhaps it has a little too much green? (Gene Davis, Celtic Dawn, 1960.)

Sullied! I can’t think of a better word to describe my feelings about lemon chiffon. If I take a step back and consider the cake, I’m capable of enjoying the color. I love a citrus, I live for spring daffodils, and I can see the appeal of so-called “canary” diamonds. Perhaps I should embrace light yellow, but somehow, I can’t. The associations are too strong.

“This poetic depiction of a star-streaked sky combines the long broken brushstrokes of Cross's late works with a murky landscape of pen and ink, reminiscent in its impressionistic forms of Japanese painting.” (Landscape with Stars, Henri-Edmond Cross, 1905.)

And it’s not the association between light yellow and illness that gets me heated. It’s the way yellow feels so infantile and feminine. Coquette, if you will. Regressively nostalgic. And deceptively so. Unlike pink, which has been reclaimed as part of high-femme camp, yellow is sneakily regressive. It has plausible deniability—childrens’ retailers would have you believe it’s “gender neutral,” even though we all know it is not—but what screams TRAD louder than a yellow sweater set paired with pearls? Or a yellow flowered Reformation dress with a little milkmaid bodice? Can’t you just imagine Ballerina Farm dressed all in lemon, swanning about her dairy cows, doing pirouettes and blowing air kisses at the camera?

I’m being ridiculous, I know that. A color can’t hurt me, and plenty of radical communists wear lemon chiffon. (Probably, right? I mean I haven’t seen it, but surely some do?) But the thing is: colors can be oppressive. Not in any material way, but in the way that a yellow room might make one nauseated, or in the way that a smell might cause one’s eye to twitch. We’ve all felt that aesthetic disease, that uncanny distaste. And often, it’s a precursor to some larger betrayal.

Bad vibes, if you will.

Detail from Cloud Study by Jon Constable, 1822

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With love,

Katy