History of Chartreuse: Fishing’s BEST color?

Chartreuse, yellow-green, greenish yellow…whatever you call that color that lies somewhere between green and yellow, fishermen know how artful this pigment can be at drawing strikes from game fish.

I still remember the first time I watched Jimmy Houston roll a chartreuse spinnerbait through a canvas of muddy water one Saturday morning may years ago, and I even etched my first largemouth bass catch on a chartreuse Strike King Grass Frog just like this.

Since then my tackle box has been plastered with chartreuse and I have used it to tempt everything from Chesapeake stripers to California spotties, but I’ve always wondered who came up with this crazy color in the first place and what makes it so effective at attracting finned predators.

Well, today on Retro Bassin’ we are going to answer those questions and more as we take in deep dive into the history of the color chartreuse.

The color “chartreuse” originates from a French liqueur by the same name crafted by Carthusian monks since 1737. The liqueur known as the “elixir of life” was named after the monks’ Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Chartreuse Mountains in southeastern France.

You’ll notice that tint of chartreuse liqueur lacks the florescence of the chartreuse we know and love today, and the 1960 Universal film Chartroose Caboose even featured a similarly muted yellow-green colored train car.

When bass fishermen think of chartreuse, however, they likely think of a more neon yellow version, which can be traced back to the 1930s when a University of California student named Bob Switzer found himself confined to a dark room while recovering from a head injury that blurred his vision.

There in the dark, Switzer and his chemistry student brother mixed Murine eye wash with alcohol and shellac until they formulated a substance that glowed fluorescent yellow under black light.

Now let’s talk about the science of sight.

The eye is made up of two different photoreceptors one called rods and the other cones.

Rods enable pigmentation in low-light conditions but don’t aid in color visualization. Think how it’s hard to distinguish different colors in a dimly lit room.

Cones, on the other hand, allow us to see the color of object around us. Humans generally have three different types of cones—red, green, and blue—and each is sensitive to a different wavelength of visible light.

Basically, the more types of cones you have the more colors you can see. Many birds, insects, fish—and apparently 12% of women—have four types of cones, and thus can see 100% more colors than the rest of us with only three cones. The mantis shrimp possesses an amazing 16 types of cones, so their ability to interpret subtle color variations must be exponentially better than ours!

Conversely, dogs have only two cones and can see fewer colors.
Interestingly, colorblind humans have one or more compromised cone types, thus leading to reduced color perception.

So what about our subject, the largemouth bass?

Brown first studied bass vision in 1937, finding bass could discern red and green from all other colors, yet had difficulty telling yellow from white and blue from black.

In 2019, researchers applied modern scientific statistics and replication to Brown’s work, confirming largemouth do indeed have dichromatic color vision, meaning they have only two types of cones, green and red.

The study concluded bass rarely confuse red with green, but often confuse blue with black and yellow with white. In other words, that black-and-blue jig or that white-and-chartreuse spinnerbait likely appear to as a solid-colored object to our “colorblind” bass.

So what makes chartreuse so special?

Some say chartreuse stands out above all other colors in stained or muddy water, while others claim fluorescent chartreuse is actually one of the most lifelike colors around, mimicking the natural hues of baitfish.

I can’t say which of those theories is correct, all I know is whenever I tie on a chartreuse-colored lure a lifetime of catches washes over my mind’s eye. So to all the Bassin’ Buds out there, I hope you paint you next angling masterpiece with chartreuse.

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