The trademark color of the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower is very fond of changes, surprisingly, but throughout history its color has changed quite noticeably many times. It’s hard to imagine how much paint should be used to color such a giant structure. During the history the Eiffel Tower appeared before Parisians and guests of the city in different tones. In total, the tower was repainted 19 times (1 time every 7 years). Below is a shot from «Des Racines et Des Ailes. La Tour Eiffel a 120 ans » documentary.

At first the tower was painted red (in 1889), 13 years later it was repainted in yellow, in 1899 — in beige, in 1907 — in brown. Since 1954, the tower has become a burgundy red, and in 1968 acquired its proprietary patented color — “Eiffel Tower Brown”.

About “Eiffel Tower Brown”

In fact, the tower is not painted in one, in three shades of brown colors. It is done so that the color of the tower seemed indistinguishable from a distance. It is quite easy to explain this decision. The structure of the upper tier of the tower has a greater density than on the lower plus the constructions shadows cast are taken into account. if you paint the entire tower in one color, then the places with the largest density of partitions will appear darker, and with the smaller — lighter. That’s how optics lows work, nothing can be done about it! 

Therefore, three shades of the same color were selected for coloring, Regular Tower color maintenance usually takes a year of 25 employees team to paint 250 thousand square meters of metal of the entire construction.