4 Color names for "Indian Red"

Indian red is a pigment, a variety of ocher, which gets its colour from ferric oxide, produced in India. Other shades of iron oxides include Venetian Red, English Red, and Kobe. Chestnut is a colour similar to but separate and distinct from Indian red.

Deep Indian red is the colour originally called Indian red from its formulation in 1903 until 1999, but now called chestnut, in Crayola crayons.This colour was also produced in a special limited edition in which it was called Vermont maple syrup. At the request of educators worried that children mistakenly believed the name represented the skin color of Native Americans, Crayola changed the name of their crayon color Indian Red to Chestnut in 1999.

This red is a tone of Indian red, made like Indian red with pigment made from iron oxide. The first recorded use of English red as a colour name in English was in the 1700s (exact year uncertain). In the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot in 1765, alternate names for Indian red included "what one also calls, however improperly, English Red."

Venetian red is a light and warm (somewhat unsaturated) pigment that is a darker shade of red, derived from nearly pure ferric oxide (Fe2O3) of the hematite type. Modern versions are frequently made with synthetic red iron oxide. Historically, Venetian red was a red earth color often used in Italian Renaissance paintings. It was also called sinopia because the best-quality pigment came from the port of Sinop in northern Turkey. It was the major ingredient in the pigment called cinabrese, described by the 15th-century Italian painter and writer Cennino Cennini in his handbook on painting, Il libro dell'arte. The first recorded use of Venetian red as a color name in English was in 1753.