Bastard Amber

A shade of Amber used in Theater Lighting Gels. It is fairly warm and pink-ish and is highly popular for lighting almost any sort of daytime scene in a play -- outdoors and indoors... it helps prevent the actors from seeming washed out and corpse-ish.

The reason it is named Bastard Amber (besides making hordes of middle school theatre students giggle madly) is because it was actually a mistake. The company was trying to mix up a batch of normal Amber and something went wrong. However, when a director picked it up, he really loved it. Then they had to reverse engineer it and figure what screwed up the color in the first place, so that now they could do it on purpose.

Generations (well, I exagerrate. Not quite generations) of techies, Directors, and theater-types have been grateful ever since.

When talking in proper circles, especially to non-techies, and in non-theatre settings (such as high school, church, etc.), it acceptable to simply say 'bamber', a faux contraction of 'Bastard Amber'. It saves a lot of explaination and odd looks.

One minor problem with bastard amber gels is that they seem to 'wear out' (become faded, brittle) as fast as, say, blue. This could either be due to the opacity, or simply because they are used so often -- it is in the perfect visual range for the human eye in that it's very close to the hue of reflected sunlight.