‘Red and green should never be seen’ is a piece of folk fashion advice warning that red and green clash and should not be worn together. It usually arrives as a rhyme with an exception tacked on the end, most famously ‘except upon an Irish queen’. In Britain the same advice is at least as often given about a different pair of colours, as ‘blue and green should never be seen, except with something in between’. Either way it is a dress-code proverb rather than a serious rule, and these days it is mostly quoted by people in the act of breaking it.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘red and green should never be seen’?
This is folklore, not a quotation. No author has ever been traced for either version of the rhyme and no reference work offers a convincing first appearance in print. What the record does show is the saying passing down orally as dress-code advice, mostly from mothers and grandmothers to daughters, in Britain, Ireland and Australia. Collectors of colour rhymes have taken down versions from women born around the turn of the twentieth century, which puts it in circulation by the early 1900s at the latest; anything more precise would be guesswork.
The two versions compete to this day. The red one usually runs ‘red and green should never be seen, except upon an Irish queen’, or ‘an Irish colleen’; the blue one, ‘blue and green should never be seen, except with something in between’. The Irish queen is probably there for no better reason than the rhyme; as sceptics point out, she could as easily have been Swedish or Scottish.
As colour advice the rhyme cannot even agree with itself. Red and green sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, so pairing them gives the strongest contrast available; blue and green sit side by side, so pairing them gives almost none. A rule that condemns both maximum contrast and minimum contrast is not a theory of colour, it is a superstition about looking loud. Painters never took any notice: Raphael dressed the Virgin in red and green in the Madonna della Sedia around 1513, and the Impressionists set reds against greens quite deliberately, as in Pissarro’s Haymaking of 1887.
More ingenious origin stories circulate, involving ships’ red and green navigation lights or the markings of venomous snakes, but none comes with any evidence and they read like explanations invented after the fact. The fashion world, meanwhile, has reversed the verdict entirely, sometimes flipping the rhyme into ‘blue and green should always be seen’. It has worn rather less well than that other folk rhyme, ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’, which at least had some weather sense behind it.