Yellow ochre is humanity's first pigment — evidence of its use dates to 164,000 BCE at Pinnacle Point, South Africa. The same mineral compound that colours cave paintings at Lascaux also colours the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs, the flesh tones of Renaissance Madonnas, and the wheatfields of Van Gogh. No pigment spans more of human history.

Warm, ancient, and foundational. Yellow ochre is the colour that preceded all others in human use — it carries 164,000 years of human aesthetic intention. It is the yellow of earth itself: not the brightness of sunlight or the intensity of cadmium, but the warm, grounded yellow of the soil we walk on and the clay we build with. Universally comfortable, universally accessible.

The ochre deposits of Roussillon (Vaucluse, France) gave the landscape its extraordinary colour — entire villages built from ochre stone create a landscape that is simultaneously geology and palette. The ochre mines of Rustrel (the "Colorado of Provence") attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. In Aboriginal Australian culture, yellow ochre is used in ceremony and body painting as a sacred material connecting the living to Country.