Variations of purple
The actual colour of Tyrian purple, the original color purple from which the name purple is derived, is the colour of a dye made from a mollusk that, because of its incredible expense (many times more expensive than gold), in classical antiquity became a symbol of royalty because only the very wealthy could afford it.
Therefore, Tyrian purple is also called imperial purple
Royal purple is a dark violet colour and is bluer than the ancient Tyrian purple. In medieval Europe, blue dyes were rare and expensive, so only the most wealthy or the aristocracy could afford to wear them. (The working class wore mainly green and brown.) Because of this (and also because Tyrian purple had gone out of use in western Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476), Europeans’ idea of purple shifted towards this more bluish purple known as royal purple because of its similarity to the royal blue worn by the aristocracy. This was the shade of purple worn by kings in medieval Europe
Orchid is a light shade of purple
Heliotrope is a brilliant shade of purple
Psychedelic purple was created in the late 1960s by mixing fluorescent magenta and fluorescent blue pigments together to use in psychedelic black light paintings
Electric purple is precisely halfway between violet and magenta and thus fits the artistic definition of purple
