Describing Colours and Pantone

Does anyone else find describing colours hard? Often other people don't necessarily relate to the same descriptions of colours as you would, for example when I described a colour as 'Aubergine' to a friend she gave me a blank look, so I said 'well you know, a dark, purply, browny kind of colour'. Sure some colours are easier to describe and people will get the gist of what colour you are talking about; if I was to describe a colour to someone I would say (as an example) 'a light shade of acidy, olive yellow'. Whereas someone else may simply say 'yellow' which to me is so vague! I like detail...

There are some generic colour descriptions that people use which are standard such as 'lemon yellow', 'banana yellow', 'baby pink', 'grass green', 'lipstick pink' (there are so many shades of lipstick that is just a silly description) and 'postbox red'. I find it entertaining the creative names paint companies come up with for their vast ranges of colours. I think 'Elephant breath' is the funniest I have ever heard, but there are so many. Coming back to the generic descriptions; Postbox red, I guess is a UK thing, aren't postboxes yellow in other countries? I took photos of 3 different postboxes around London and despite a bit of weathering and wear and tear, the uniform colour of postbox red is still very prominent.

Sometimes you see old pinky red postboxes, I would define this colour as vintage postbox red...

One of the common descriptions for colour that irks me the most is 'Sky blue'. The sky changes colour so frequently depending on geographic location, time of day, season, weather and pollution. I have started a little project that I have called sky 365 taking a photo of the sky every day and looking at the variations in colour. Below are 3 very different shades of 'sky blue':

I believe you could apply this theory to ocean blue or to leaf green to name but a few. This leads me to conclude that colours in a nature are always evolving and changing. A colour such as Postbox red is a colour that The Royal Mail have selected and will only change with age, environmental factors, or with what surface it is applied to. In the 1950's Pantones were created as a colour indexing system for graphic designers and printing houses, this standardising of colours known as 'Pantone Matching System' used in not only graphic design but the manufacturing of fabric, plastics and paint to perfectly match and reproduce exact shades of colour which are numbered. I love looking in Pantone folders at work, it makes life so much easier. As a colour obsessive I bought the Pantone box of postcards just experiment with colour groups and combinations.