Buff (colour) Buff (colour) Buff is the pale orange-brown colour of the undyed leather of several animals. As an RYB quaternary colour, it is the colour produced by an equal mix of the tertiary colours citron and russet. The first recorded use of the word "buff" to describe a colour was in "The London Gazette" of 1686, describing a uniform to be "...a Red Coat with a Buff-colour'd lining". It referred to the colour of undyed buffalo leather, such as soldiers wore as some protection: an eyewitness to the death in the Battle of Edgehill (1642) of Sir Edmund Verney noted "he
George Palmer (colour theorist) is moved by its own ray." This statement has proved true in regard to the number of different light sensor types, the cones, in the human eye, if not in regard to the claim of three kinds of light. Twenty-five years later a similar statement was made by the eminent physicist Thomas Young. Voigt, in his report on Giros von Gentilly, describes him as having stated that colour blindness arises if one or two of the three kinds of "particles" (light sensors) in the retina are inactive, a statement found to be accurate. In 1786 Palmer provided a hypothesis for