A saturated color is its purest version, the kind you might find on a children’s building-block set. The truest blue and the sunniest yellow: these colors are strong and intense. To desaturate colors, you add gray to them, making them duller versions of themselves. Spring green becomes olive; cerulean becomes slate. Beige is a desaturated yellow—a yellow with all the joy sucked out of it! Gray is the ultimate desaturated color, containing only white and black.
