Wondering what shade is poison-green, I discovered that Pantone has given it a vivid verdancy; the hex-code is 49B960 and it looks like this… slightly paler than I expected.

NEVER BE SEEN IN POISON GREEN LEST IT GO TO YOUR HEAD AND RENDER YOU DEAD.

It seems that green is associated with poison partly due to pigments used in the Victorian era which were toxic due to their arsenic content. Women and girls working in the flower or fashion industries suffered horrific green-tinged illnesses and eventually death as a result. It’s curious therefore that the colour so-named was still considered fashionable enough to embellish an aristocratic home in Hungary at the turn of the 20th century.

‘The walls of the long gallery were panelled in wood that had also been painted grey and were lined with wide divans covered in a vivid, poison-green brocade.’

Pass the arsenic, will you?  Give me apple-green any day.

Source: Miklos Banffy, They Were Counted, trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Banffy-Jelen (London: Arcadia Books, 1999 (1934)), p. 316