Milk and Water

This color is often mentioned in texts from Elizabethan England. In the sixteenth century, it was very popular among all social classes because it was achieved not by dyeing but by carefully bleaching wool and linen with a very small, almost homeopathic, addition of blue dye. It is precisely the faint bluish shade that distinguishes ‘milk and water’ from simple white. Interestingly, the tradition of using faintly bluish shades of white in clothing, especially in underwear, lasted generations. Even our grandmothers added a synthetic blue dye, known as laundry blue, to water during washing. White laundry after using laundry blue seemed cleaner. And some laundry doers have still not parted ways with laundry blue and use it to this day.

Today, in the hexadecimal code used by designers, it is denoted by the value #F6F6FF.