Here is something that will make you stop and think. Many ancient languages had no word for blue at all.

Ancient Greek, one of the most sophisticated languages ever developed, had words for dark and light, for warm and cool, for a vast range of colours. But no specific term for blue. Homer famously described the sea as "wine-dark." The sky goes uncoloured in countless ancient texts.

Researchers studying the evolution of colour vocabulary across languages have found a striking pattern: almost every culture develops words for black and white first, then red, then yellow and green, and blue almost always last. Some languages today still do not have a dedicated word for blue distinct from green.

This does not mean ancient people could not see blue. It means blue was so absent from their material world, so difficult to produce and possess, that it had not yet demanded its own name. You name what you encounter. What you cannot make, you may never need to categorise.

The first blue: Egypt and the birth of synthetic pigment

The ancient Egyptians were the first civilisation to crack the problem. Around 2500 BCE, they developed what we now call Egyptian blue: a synthetic pigment made by heating a mixture of sand, copper, and calcium to extremely high temperatures. The result was a rich, stable, vivid blue that could be ground into powder and applied to surfaces.

This was a genuine technological breakthrough. Egyptian blue decorated the tombs of pharaohs, the walls of temples, and the painted surfaces of some of the most important objects in the ancient world. It was a manufactured colour, the first of its kind, and it gave Egypt a kind of chromatic power that other civilisations simply did not have.

But the knowledge did not travel well. When Egyptian civilisation declined, the formula was largely lost. For centuries after, blue became scarce again.

Lapis lazuli: the blue that came from the mountains

The most precious blue pigment in the medieval world came from a single source: a remote region of what is now northeastern Afghanistan.

Lapis lazuli is a deep blue metamorphic rock flecked with gold pyrite. It had been mined and traded for thousands of years, but it was medieval European artists who elevated it to something close to sacred. Ground into powder and carefully processed to remove impurities, it produced a pigment called ultramarine, from the Latin meaning "beyond the sea," a reference to how far it had to travel to reach European painters.

Ultramarine was extraordinary in colour. Deep, luminous, and stable in ways that other blues simply were not. It also cost, at various points in history, more per ounce than gold.

Painters and patrons negotiated over it. Contracts for altarpieces specified exactly how much ultramarine would be used, and where. It was reserved for the most sacred elements of a painting: the robes of the Virgin Mary above all else. To paint Mary in ultramarine was to signal that the patron had spared no expense, that this work was worthy of the divine.

Artists carefully rationed it. Some ground it themselves to ensure none was wasted. Michelangelo famously left the Entombment unfinished, at least partly because he could not obtain sufficient ultramarine to complete it.

The blue of the medieval world was a statement of wealth, devotion, and access to trade routes that stretched thousands of kilometres.

For centuries, European painters and manufacturers searched for a cheaper alternative. Various blues were tried: azurite (unstable, prone to turning green), smalt (a ground blue glass, dull and unreliable), indigo (better suited to textiles than paint).

Then, in 1704, a Berlin paint maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach accidentally discovered Prussian blue.

He had been attempting to make a red pigment and contaminated his materials with potassium. The result was a deep, rich, vivid blue of a kind that had never been produced synthetically before, and that could be manufactured cheaply, at scale, anywhere in the world.

Prussian blue swept through European art almost immediately. It was exported to Japan, where it became central to woodblock printing. Hokusai's Great Wave, that iconic image, owes its extraordinary blue to a Prussian pigment accidentally invented in a Berlin workshop.

The democratisation of blue had begun.

Synthetic ultramarine and the world we live in now

In 1826, a French chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet developed a process to synthesise ultramarine artificially. The pigment that had once cost more than gold could now be manufactured in factories. Within decades, the price had collapsed.

Blue was no longer a luxury. It entered wallpapers, fabrics, inks, and paints at a scale that would have been unimaginable to a medieval artist rationing a teaspoon of the real thing.

Today, blue is so abundant we barely notice it. But that ubiquity is extraordinarily recent. For nearly all of human history, the colour that now covers our jeans and fills our phone screens was something people lived and died without ever being able to produce or possess.

The history of blue is really a history of human ingenuity, trade, and the desire to capture and recreate what we see in the world around us.

We look at the sky. We look at the sea. We want to hold that colour, to put it on a wall or a canvas or a piece of cloth. And for most of history, we simply could not.

Colour is never just decoration. It is technology. It is chemistry. It is the result of someone, somewhere, figuring out how light and matter interact.

That is the same fascination that sits at the heart of CMY Cubes. When you hold one up to the light and watch cyan, magenta, and yellow do things that seem almost impossible, you are participating in the same long human story: the attempt to understand, play with, and celebrate the physics of colour.

Blue took thousands of years to unlock. We think that is worth remembering next time you look at the sky.