Misato's Hair - Purple or Black? (It's purple.)

[Bagheera]

[Split from Bagheera's post just before this one, all other posts went into this tangent below. - Staff]

On the topic of Misato's hair: in most scenes in the anime it is not purple. This is more a product of Sadamoto's illustrations and various shading techniques that give it a purple sheen under some lighting conditions (which is occasionally seen in real life people as well). Her hair is actually black.

Regarding measurements, I like the fact that they're currently given in both Imperial and Metric. I think the Metric is essential, since the U.S. is not the center of the world, but including both makes it easier for everyone.

[Reichu]

Purple base color with lavender highlights. Definitely not black.

[Bagheera]

It's black in that picture. Here is a selection of anime characters with purple hair. That is what purple means. Misato's hair is a stylized black, representing hair that seems to take on bluish highlights in certain light. As I said, this is not uncommon in the real world.

That said, Misato's hair color varies almost as much as Asuka's, as you can see here. It's often purple in fan art and Sadamoto's work (though he seems to be inconsistent about it himself), but ranges from the shade in the picture you posted to a true black in the show.

[pwhodges]

Well, the darkest parts may simply be shadow rather than the base colour. Also, they are just slightly bluish (eg #0a171f and similar ratios), in contrast to her black shirt (largely #000000).

[Reichu]

Well, the darkest parts may simply be shadow rather than the base colour. Also, they are just slightly bluish, in contrast to her shirt.

The darkest parts are indeed shadow.

The majority of the linked pictures actually confirm "purple = base color". Exceptions do not confirm the black hypothesis. Why in the world would black have a "purple sheen" and then lavender highlights on top of the purple sheen? Sometimes cartoon characters just have purple hair!

When it's difficult to determine a character's hair color, due to the quality of artwork being various / unreliable photography techniques / flawed color correction, you go to the best sources available. What color is actually used on the cels? Well... it's purple. The hue used for her hair was even packaged up for modelers in the officially licensed "Eva Colors" as "Misato Purple".

[pwhodges]

Of course, we see plenty of pictures of Misato with clearly purple hair; but I do have difficulty in accepting the description "purple" for the picture above - in my eyes #323675 is a desaturated blue with no hint of extra redness to justify the word purple. Only in the lavender hightlights does a little extra red creep in.

[Bagheera]

Well, the darkest parts may simply be shadow rather than the base colour. Also, they are just slightly bluish (eg #0a171f and similar ratios), in contrast to her black shirt (largely #000000).

Yes, it is as you say. But again, note the variation in her depiction both in the show and the movies -- there are plenty of scenes where her hair is indeed black. This is why I think the bluish tinge is stylistic rather than her actual hair color (this is reinforced in my mind because it was pretty common in the days of four color comics to have characters with black hair had hair that looked exactly like Misato's. Take a look at this shot of Superman, for instance. Nobody's going to claim that Clark Kent has purple hair, and yet his hair is shaded exactly like Misato's in that picture. You can see it even more clearly here).

Of course, we see plenty of pictures of Misato with clearly purple hair; but I do have difficulty in accepting the description "purple" for the picture above - in my eyes #323675 is a desaturated blue with no hint of extra redness to justify the word purple. Only in the lavender hightlights does a little extra red creep in.

Note that the pics of her with purple hair are typically from artwork and not from the show or films. This isn't always the case, but the vast majority of the time her hair is either black or the shade you describe. And, given how easy it is to make an anime character's hair purple if that's what the animators are going for I find it rather silly to think they'd be mucking around with shades like this if a certain amount of ambiguity wasn't the goal.

But then, these are the same people who gave Asuka everything from plain brown hair to that carrot-colored atrocity seen in EoE, so who can say?

[Reichu]

Of course, we see plenty of pictures of Misato with clearly purple hair; but I do have difficulty in accepting the description "purple" for the picture above

That was probably a result of color correction to make the screenshot less dark. The purple is a little bluer than it should be, though to my set of cones it's still clearly purple, so I didn't see it as a big issue.

I found these two versions of the same image on my HD and I thought it an apt demonstration.

SPOILER: Show

The bottom one shows the colors MUCH truer to form. (Its only weakness is that the skin tones are too bleached out.) However, the top version is the one you'll see more often. Distorted color like this probably helps spur fanboy wars about Asuka's hair being "brown", when in fact it was painted red-orange to start with and the process of reproduction messed it up. This thing about Misato's hair is more of the same.

[NemZ]

It's just a bluer tint of the same dark magenta Ritsuko's hair actually is. Whether we're supposed to read that as black or just accept it as-is... does it really matter?

[Bagheera]

SPOILER: Show

The bottom one shows the colors MUCH truer to form.

According to whom? The top one is how they look in the show, and as you say the bottom one messes with skin tones so it doesn't seem "true to form" at all.

Distorted color like this probably helps spur fanboy wars about Asuka's hair being "brown", when in fact it was painted red-orange to start with and the process of reproduction messed it up. This thing about Misato's hair is more of the same.

Asuka's hair actually is brown throughout much of the show, and it was even brown in the proposal. And her hair color did vary considerably throughout the course of the show, so dismissing the observation as "fanboy wars" seems unfairly dismissive to me.

[Ash1969]

So I was looking at original series Asuka's page, and where they list her relatives, I noticed her father's name Langley is misspelled as Langely.

[UrsusArctos]

Minor typo, fixed.

And the whole hair color fight confuses the daylights out of me, although I'm pretty sure I've seen Misato with purple hair and Asuka with orange hair plenty of times in the show. I always thought that Asuka's hair appearing brown was due to the lighting conditions it was seen in.

[Bagheera]

Asuka’s hair color is all over the map. In some shots in early episodes (e.g. during gym in episode 9) it’s brown even in broad daylight, while in others (e.g. after she’s taken a shower) it looks a natural red. It’s more consistently red later in the show, but it was only in the DC work and EoE that it took on that garish orange color; it never looked like that in the broadcast version of the show.

With Misato, it’s the lighting conditions that make it look purple at times! Shading hair using those tones is a common shortcut in the anime industry for portraying black hair, as black is apparently difficult to work with. Another good example of this is Lynn Minmay: her hair usually looks blue or even purple, but in the right lighting it becomes clear it’s actually black (the fact another character in the show actually has proper blue hair makes the contrast clear). Misato’s not as good of an example since IIRC her hair is actually purple in the settai sheets, but it’s rarely portrayed that way in the show, no matter the lighting conditions. The main reason I say it’s black, though, is because no one in the cast apart from Rei (and Kaworu I guess) has unnatural hair colors; Misato’s the only one that’s even questionable. I guess it’s possible Misato dyes her hair just like Ritz does, so who knows?

Amusing bit of trivia: you’re actually more likely to get blue or black highlights when you dye hair using black dye than you are with naturally black hair, because the latter isn’t really black! Instead it’s a dark, dark brown that looks black under all but the highest scrutiny. You still occasionally get blue or purple hues if the hair is well-cared for, but it’s a lot more common with the dye. So, in an amusing twist, Misato’s hair might appear purple because she dyed it black!

[UrsusArctos]

I wouldn't be surprised if Misato decided to use a slightly purplish hair dye to give her hair a tinge of something special - being Japanese, it would be incredibly rare for her natural hair color to be anything other than black/dark brown. However, IIRC her hair is shown as purplish rather than black/dark brown in Episode 21 when Fuyutsuki sees her briefly post-2I. Maybe she decided to be a punk and dye her hair even as a teenager - which would fit nicely with Crying Man!

However, I do wonder what the idea was if they wanted her hair to be purple in the settai sheets - did they want her to stick out more or something?

The Lynn Minmay example is pretty interesting, I admit...

[Reichu]

her hair is shown as purplish rather than black/dark brown in Episode 21 when Fuyutsuki sees her briefly post-2I. Maybe she decided to be a punk and dye her hair even as a teenager

Misato's been in captivity for two years, so what you see is what you get.

With the settei showing Misato's hair as purple and Asuka's as orange-red, I'm baffled over why anyone would try to argue otherwise based on what's "seen in the show". It's common knowledge that NGE was produced by photographing cels, the old-fashioned way, right? This is before the digital age of colors being reproduced exactly as intended, and as a result they're all over the map. If you have any eye for color at all, it's blatantly obvious by looking at the contrast I posted that the bottom image is the better balanced of the two. If you think the top is better, you've disqualified your cones from having a valid opinion about anything chromatic. (I could produce numerous other examples of colors being distorted based on photographic methodology, but that would clearly be a waste of time.)

In any case, this argument is balls. It's not up to one person's say-so whether somebody's outlandish hair color is "intended" to be a stylized representation of a natural hair color or not. You don't get to say it isn't the color that it obviously is, unless you have a citation for that. It's a cartoon; they can do whatever they want, and others can interpret it however they want.

[Bagheera]

Okay, previous post wasn't helpful, so I'm replacing it with this one:

I checked Misato's settei sheets, and discovered I'd misremembered -- her hair is unambiguously black in those, with pale lavender highlights. So, it's as I said in my original comment -- while a lot of artwork, both official and non-, depicts her with purple hair her hair is actually black. I suspect the shade of blue Paul identified is used in the anime to get around the trouble of working with actual black, which I I noted previously is a common shortcut in the anime industry and has been for decades now. So, the settei sheets say her hair is black, and that is that!

I'm going to check some of Sadamoto's work when I get home to see if he's consistent in his depiction of her; my vague recollection is that he's not, but I could be misattributing some iconic pieces of artwork that may have been done by others.

As to Asuka, the variation in her hair color isn't just a matter of production issues. Her hair varies more than any other character's in the show, both onscreen and off. I suspect at least part of this is due to the fact that Sadamoto draws her as a strawberry blonde; that might have confused some of the studiios doing the gruntwork early on, leading them to depict her with pail brown hair instead of anything resembling what we see in the settei sheets (and it's not like they couldn't do it or make it look right, because her hair was the proper color at several points, mostly after she'd gotten out of the shower). For whatever reason the animators couldn't pick a color and stick with it.

[Nuclear Lunchbox]

1.0 CRC confirms Misato's hair to be purple in NTE. That settles that.

[Bagheera]

Guess Asuka's not the only one who got a makeover, then!

[Chuckman]

I can't believe you people are arguing that Misato has purple hair when the show makes a point of Rei being the only character with "anime color hair". She has black hair and the purple highlights are an animation technique; blue and purple have been used to give depth to black which would otherwise be a solid color since the founding days of animation and four color comic printing.

[Nuclear Lunchbox]

I'm not surprised that some of the characters look different in the new movies. It's easier to deal with different colors now than it was back in the day (color work is a tricky thing in animation!) and I also wouldn't be surprised if someone just said, "Y'know what? I like how the character looks this way." I don't have any books for NGE (yet. I hope that changes) but as far as colors for NTE goes, the CRCs have this great section with color palates for all the characters. It's a very useful resource.