Color is a vital ingredient of the material world. So it must appear in stories and novels as well. Surprisingly, it is used much less often and much less carefully than we would expect.

Recently I found the following description of a heroine in a short story:

She was a pretty, smallish girl with blue eyes, fair hair and blood-red lips.

On the surface quite a detailed description but, in actual fact, it hardly tells us anything. In any Caucasian population countless little girls fit that description. Blue has dozens of shades, fair hair has about a dozen and blood can range from very bright to very dark. Such vague references to color are meaningless.

If you want to brighten your prose and make your descriptions more vivid, it will be worth your while to spend some time on the study of colors. As always, the internet is an ideal place to start. One of my favorite sources of information is Wikipedia. It's free, the basic articles are generally quite good and their referring links enable you to delve ever deeper.

In this case our starting page would be: List of Colors.

Lets take blue, for instance. There's a lot of choice, ranging from familiar shades such as light blue, navy blue or azure to the much lesser known robin-egg blue, united-nations blue, smalt, periwinkle or cerulean.

Instantly the danger of excess looms. Once you've learned of these colors, you'll be eager to use them. That's only natural, but there's no point in showing off your profound knowledge if your readers haven't a clue what you are talking about. The finer distinctions between Columbia blue and Maya blue are lost on them. Nor will they be overly impressed by the nuances between the Egyptian and Persian blues. On the other hand most educated readers will know what you mean by cyan, cornflower blue, denim or indigo.

Other colors offer us a similar wealth of choice. Reds, for instance, are even more abundant than blues, some very familiar such as crimson, ruby and scarlet, others rather extraordinary such as burgundy, cardinal, cerise, magenta or vermilion.

Things are slightly different for hair colors. But again the Wikipedia offers us an entry: go to the page called Blond.

Here we see, among others, platinum, ash, sunny, sandy, golden, strawberry, bleached, zebra and honey blonds.

By taking just a little trouble to find exactly the right shade you can add a freshness to your descriptions that no cliché can ever accomplish.