What Are Different Colours Of High-Vis Clothing Used For?

For the most part, safety trade workwear used on sites where safe working practices are essential tend to have a very similar hue to them.

Besides often being a legal requirement, hi-vis clothing is often a very useful choice for ensuring that different workers stand out in busy environments and so they can easily be spotted and accidents averted.

The most commonly used colour is of course chartreuse, a mix of yellow and green that is paired with retroreflective strips, but did you know that there are several hi-vis colours?

Chartreuse has become the de facto standard largely because it is the brightest colour and is easily picked up when a light hits it at night, especially with reflective strips made with the same technology used in cat’s eye road signals.

It is not the only colour that is used, nor is it even the first hi-vis colour to be widely used in Great Britain. In 1964, ScR, the Scottish Region of British Railways, started to experiment with the use of brightly coloured clothing for workers on the track.

These were coloured fluorescent orange and led to track workers receiving the nickname “fireflies as a result. To this day, railways in the UK use orange jackets instead of the more conventional chartreuse, and this makes them immediately distinguishable in a crowd.

As well as this, orange is often used by dock workers as well as people working at sea, as it contrasts more strongly against the blues and greys of the ocean compared to the yellow-green of other conventional high-vis clothing.

Finally, albeit somewhat rarely, neon pink has seen increasing use for workers in more verdant settings, as the pink hue is not often seen in nature and contrasts more strongly than orange or green potentially would, especially with the help of retroreflective additions.