Shades: when the same stamp is a different colour

Stamps · 8 September 2026

Two copies of the same design in visibly different colours can mean three very different things. They can come from separate printings with deliberately or accidentally different ink – a shade, and a catalogue variety. They can be the result of a chemical change in the pigment. Or one of them has simply been left in the light. Only the first is worth anything, and telling them apart is done by comparison, never by memory.

Three reasons colour differs

1. Printing. Ink was mixed in batches, and long-running issues were printed repeatedly over years. Differences between printings are catalogued as shades and belong to identification, alongside paper and perforation as in the guide to paper and gum.
2. Chemical change. Some pigments react with sulphur compounds in the air or with damp, shifting to a different colour entirely. The change affects the whole printed area evenly and can sometimes be identified because that pigment is known to behave that way.
3. Light. Fading is the commonest cause and the least interesting. It attacks the exposed parts first, so a stamp faded in an album shows a pale face and a normal edge where the mount covered it.

How to tell them apart

• Look at the edges under the mount. A protected strip of full colour against a paler centre means light damage, not a shade.
• Check whether the change is even. Chemical change usually affects the whole printed area uniformly; fading is graded.
• Compare like with like. Same issue, same state, same light source, side by side. Colour perception is relative, and a stamp seen alone tells you almost nothing.
• Use daylight. Warm indoor bulbs shift everything toward yellow and make honest comparison impossible.
• Check the back. Paper toning changes how the front reads; a yellowed paper makes a blue look green.

Why fading matters more than it seems

A faded stamp is a condition problem, not a variety, and it is permanent – no treatment restores pigment. It also spreads through a collection quietly: an album left on a windowsill fades page after page. The storage rules that prevent it are the ones in the guide to storing a paper collection, and the same applies to postcards and posters, whose inks fade faster still.

Photographing colour honestly

1. Shoot in daylight or under a consistent neutral light, never mixed sources.
2. Include a reference stamp of known colour in the frame when the point is comparison.
3. Do not adjust saturation or white balance afterwards – it invents differences that are not there, which defeats the purpose entirely.
4. Follow the general method in the guide to photographing a collection: even light, square framing, no flash.

Where comparison is easiest

Reference images are the practical way to see whether a colour is plausible for an issue at all, before deciding it is a shade. The open archive holds 80,472 stamp images from 271 countries and territories and 6,382 Soviet issues of 1918–1991, shown large enough to compare tone – with the caveat that any screen shifts colour, so the archive answers "which issue" reliably and "which shade" only approximately.

Open the catalogue: world stamps, Soviet stamps.