Garnet

There are two kinds of red on a phone. One is bright, arrives before the person carrying it, and is exhausting by the second month. The other is mixed dark, with brown in it, and reads as a considered choice rather than as a statement.

Garnet is the second kind. It is the one colour in this catalogue that is genuinely noticeable, and it is mixed so that being noticeable is not the only thing it does.

It photographs

Most dark colours collapse to black in a photograph. Garnet does not, because the brown in it holds under a camera’s white balance where a pure red goes orange and a burgundy goes flat. On a phone that is held up constantly, in other people’s photographs as often as your own, that is a practical property rather than a vanity.

Living with it

A dark red is forgiving in the way dark colours are — fine scuffing disappears into it and denim transfer does not read. Where it differs from black is that it does not go dusty. A black matte surface picks up a grey bloom over months; a pigmented red does not have the contrast for that to show.

It is the one colour here that looks better at six months than at six days.

What it does to a print

It warms everything. Highland is a full tartan cut on the bias, and on garnet the whole sett reads as wool rather than as a grid. Camellia on garnet is a single near-symmetrical bloom on a ground the same temperature as it, which makes the flower read as carved rather than printed.

Garnet is also the only ground here where a monogram in gold is not too much, because the two colours have the same depth.