As a trader who’s sold Gem Trees, crystals, minerals and jewellery on markets over many years I naturally notice what things sell best, and more than anything else, perhaps, their colour. This is especially important for our trees and the semi-precious mineral chips we use for their leaves. Some colours are ever popular such as purple amethyst, pink rose quartz, transparent rock crystal and green quartz which most people think is jade. Others sell slowly such as blue sodalite, stripy yellow-brown tiger eye and the translucent brown Madeira amber which isn’t amber at all. But then there are those colours that few people want and the chief of these is orange. The colour is in a league of its own. Nobody wants Orange! Trees with translucent warm orange leaves of the mineral Carnelian can stay on a stall month after month like a bloody reproach. And do you know something? People actually loathe them! It’s true! I’ve seen the look on their faces. They wince in disgust!
And yet, despite this, we make trees with orange leaves. Why, any sensible person would ask, do you do this when you can’t bloody-well sell them? What kind of schlemiel (that’s Yiddish for idiot) are you? All right. Don’t go on. I’ll tell you. It’s plain cussedness. I’ve got to have one tree with orange leaves on the stall. It kind of stands out. In a sea of fiery garnet reds, regal amethyst purple, delectable pinks and beautiful naturalistic greens it looks… well, it looks different. It has a deep throbbing mellow rich glow under the light!
Okay, did I make it sound good? Well I lied! No matter how much I try talking it up it still stands there like Cinderella’s sister, making everything else look great by way of contrast. Is it that, or could it be something altogether more sinister? Do you want to know the truth, I mean the real truth? Alright then I’ll tell you. There’s some bloody worm in me that actually likes it. At last I’ve got it off my chest. I’ll always have one or two trees on the stall with carnelian leaves. They could take six months to sell and by that time they look so stuffed up with the continual packing and unpacking that you might as well give them to Oxfam. And then something happens. Along comes someone who loves it to pieces and buys it for his mother. He doesn’t want anything else. It’s the only one on the stall and he’s got to have it!
By the way I’ve got a very good memory for faces and I can’t remember anyone who’s ever bought a tree with orange leaves ever coming back to the stall! However, it’s the people who do buy them that interest me. I ask them why they bought the tree with the orange leaves and they can’t say for sure. They just stare in a cold, glassy-eyed kind of way. I’ve noticed strange, almost guilty smiles. There’s no love or passion the way it is for amethyst or the merry flush for rose quartz. No, people who buy carnelian trees are strange. They have flat voices. They’re dispassionate. They don’t get excited. They’re more like… what’s the word I’m looking for? It begins with a zed but I can’t remember what it is.
Orange! It’s not just gem trees with the carnelian leaves I have to tell you. Just consider the following. Once upon a time everyone loved Rowntree’s wine gums and pastilles. You remember them don’t you? They were good days, weren’t they? You could still think back to the time when we kicked the shit out of the Germans, when the Prime Minister smoked a pipe and talked like George Formby and when the Queen said my husband and I in a funny little voice before her son started talking to tomatoes. Yes, we all loved wine gums, pastilles, and the face of the kid on the box, but do you remember the colours? Which colours you loved best and which ones you hated. The one they always saved till last especially for you. Yeah, all your mates got the reds, greens and blacks, even the yellows. And you, what colour did you get? Yeah, you always got orange. The one you hated most. I don’t care what anyone says. As far as wine gums were concerned, the most unpopular colour, the one you really didn’t want, was orange. The black ones were best, then the reds, the greens and the yellows. That order. Bottom of the list was orange. Nobody wanted orange. They were somehow always hard. You couldn’t taste anything. The black and red ones were warm. You felt you had a taste of blackberry or wine. With the green ones it was citrus. But orange? Orange tasted like plastic!
Now why should people have this thing about orange. It’s different in Holland or Northern Ireland. At least half of all the little bald men in Belfast loved orange wine gums. I mean, can you imagine Ian Paisley’s favourite being green? We don’t object to the colour of oranges, tangerines or satsumas, do we? They’re alright. I mean, they’re naturally orange. Neither do we have a problem with orange juice or Robertson’s golden shred marmalade, or any jam made out of oranges. No, it’s only some orange things that we have a problem with, and please don’t lie to me, tell me your favourite wine gum was orange and that’s how you came to be a psychiatrist. I already know the story. There you were with your mates when the silver came off the top of the tube. Someone was offering wine gums around. George, lucky bastard, always got a black or a red and Bill got a green. Now it was your turn. Next one out, always the next one out was the orange. It was always the orange so you grew up feeling the whole world was against you! So what happened? You went to University to study psychology, George became a Tory M.P. and Bill played in the Premier League. As for Angela who fancied the yellows, you can see her regularly on Babe Station.
Orange crystals are more of a rarity than anything. Very few are what you might describe as genuinely full blown orange. There are brown gypsum crystals a vague taint of the colour but the mineral that is most decidedly orange is Realgar, something you don’t want to know. It comes as short prismatic tabular style crystals commonly found as a minor constituent of hydrothermal veins carrying arsenic minerals. In other words it’s poisonous, an arsenide which for those in the know is not someone with a fixation on bottoms. Another mineral with an orange colour is the rare and expensive Vanadinite. Its crystals are prismatic in habit and transparent to sub-translucent. The mineral is found in association with lead and lead minerals, some of the best specimens coming from Mexico and Morocco. I’m sometimes asked by collectors if I sell it but the answer is rarely if ever. Try the crystal shops if you want to pay a nasty price for anything half decent or alternatively book a plane ticket to Mexico and hire a donkey. I’ve only every once been asked for Realgar and if I remember right the guy had a problem with his mother-in-law. As far as I know its crystal healing properties are zero.
Carnelian is the most orange of minerals with a vitreous lustre and belongs in the Chalcedony family. At best it’s translucent but never as transparent as quartz. It can be used as a gemstone in rings but it’s the red form that’s popular not the orange. The chips are dirt cheap at the wholesalers because few people want them. Only idiots who occasionally stick them on gem trees.
Carnelian gem trees are very strange things. I’ve sometimes tried mixing orange and green leaves on a tree to give it an autumnal quality. You know, summer’s on the turn like the leaves. I might sell one a month and by that time I might as well be using the transparent Madeira Amber! Remember the song, “all the leaves are brown, brown, brown, and the sky is grey…” shit. Actually they sell. The colour looks good, simple as that. Orange doesn’t and there’s no way round it. It’s the same with jewellery. Carnelian earrings don’t sell. Neither do bracelets or necklaces except if they’re mixed in the latter with chunks of agate. Women just aren’t interested. It’s not a matter of belief but plain first-hand experience. I once had a giant Chico tree whose leaves were little cubes of Carnelian with the ends of the thin brass wire branches drilled into the stone. I had it on display for eight months in various markets and no-one wanted it. Oh it disappeared eventually. Someone nicked it from my paste table stall at Leather Lane! Astonishing that they wanted it so much when they could have half inched just about anything else. What does it say? Well someone must have loved orange!
It set off a whole new train of thought. If someone loved it enough to steal it I’d make a whole lot more orange trees myself, but then Louise put me right. Don’t go getting enthusiastic. It was probably one of those fundamentalists over from Northern Island. Wanted it for his front window on the Shanklin Road Estate back in Belfast. I caught the gleam in her eye. Please, no more orange. The stones had no healing power and the trees never moved off the stalls unless they were nicked. The sickly colour stayed with you forever.
Unfortunately none of this answers the question. Why is orange such an unpopular colour?
Okay wise guy, come back when you’ve got a medical degree, been practicing psychiatry for ten years and Roman Abramovitch is giving you a gold bar an hour to hear all his troubles. In the meantime, that’s all I’ve got to say about that!
