Yellow-Green

Yellow-green, sometimes called chartreuse after the pale green liqueur made by Carthusian monks, is the hue between yellow and green, and it takes its symbolism from the meeting of the two. It is above all the colour of new growth, the acid-bright green of spring buds and fresh leaves before they darken, so it reads as youth, freshness, renewal and the very beginning of life. That same brightness gives it an unstable, sometimes uneasy quality: strongly yellowed greens are also the colours of sickness, of bile and of decay, so like green itself yellow-green carries an ambivalence between vitality and illness. It has no distinct liturgical tradition of its own, colour codes historically treating it under the broader categories of green or yellow. As a named category it belongs mostly to modern colour theory and to spectrum-based systems such as the aura literature, where it is placed between the solar plexus and the heart, blending the yellow of intellect and the green of growth into a sense of expansion and fresh vitality.