Western Electric's yellow color

[bingster]

Seeing Bill Cahill's yellow 554 reminds me of something I've wondered about many times while looking at phones on eBay.  Oftentimes, one will see yellow WE phones that are a light pastel yellow, while others are a dark harvest gold color.  Did the yellow color shift over the years, or are the differences in colors caused by fading/darkening?

[Dan/Panther]

Bingster;
Thougfh I haven't seen everything, I've yet to see a Mustard Yellow WE500. I have what I call Pastel Yellow WE500, dated 7/55, and Harvest Gold on ebay, other manufacturers, Stromberg carlson, Itt, just to mention a couple, I've seen Mustard Yellow 500 style phones.
I'm curious as you did WE make a Mustard Yellow 500 ? Now let's not argue Regular Mustard, or Dijon Mustard. Regular bright Mustard Flower yellow.
D/P

[Dennis Markham]

The early colors just say Pastel Yellow.   Later I've seen Harvest Gold and into the 80's they had Lemon Yellow and Butter Yellow.  I think for the most part the darker sets from the 50's and 60's were just Pastel Yellow with some darkening from light exposure.

[JimH]

When I was a kid until I was about eight we had a WE 500 in "gold" that was in our kitchen at my mom's built-in desk from 1966 when we moved into the house.  I remember it being "gold" and we have a few pictures showing it as a darker color than yellow.  Originally my mom had ordered white, and when the installer brought it in, she asked "do you have a gold one?" and he said he did and got it from his truck.  I recently bought a 500 from 1967 all dates matching, and it is yellow.  It's much brighter than I remember ours being.  I do have a S-C that is more of a harvest gold.  I would've loved to see the color code date on the back of the dial...but it was taken out in 1973 after my mom saw and ad for "Trimline Touch-Tone" phones in the Detroit Free Press one morning.  So in came the red Trimline, and out went the 500s.  My dad then complained that the round buttons were too small for his big fingers, so we only had the Trimlines for a year.  We had them all switched out for 2500s.