Human hair color account for all possible shades of brown, blond, or red (for example, platinum blond versus dark blond/light brown), nor does it explain why hair color sometimes darkens as a person ages. Several gene pairs control the light versus dark hair color in a cumulative effect. A person's genotype for a multifactorial trait can interact with the environment to produce varying phenotypes (see quantitative trait locus). Natural hair color can be brown, blond, black, red, or white; all natural hair colors including grey, white and lightest blond, are shades of brown. The Fischer–Saller scale, named after Eugen Fischer and , is
Shades of black "X11 web colors". The color "ebony" is a representation of the color of the wood ebony, a tropical hardwood widely used to make fine furniture, notably for French kings. The first use of "ebony" as a color name in English was in 1590. The color displayed at right matches the color sample called "taupe" referenced below in the 1930 book "A Dictionary of Color", the world standard for color terms before the invention of computers. However, the word "taupe" is currently often used to refer to lighter shades of taupe, and therefore another name for this color is "dark taupe".