From William McCullar's IDIC page Tunic appears chartreuse

Same picture hit with one step of cyan Note the more realistic flesh tones

What colour were the gold uniforms in Star Trek? Well, gold, you'd think. But this passage from an interview with Trek's costume designer, Bill Theiss, casts doubt on the matter...

Another quirk involving the original series' tunics were the colors - in particular, "command." Trekkies everywhere will swear Spock wore blue, Scotty wore red and Kirk wore gold. Wrong. The three Starfleet colors were blue, red and green. Lime green, to be exact.

"It was one of those film stock things;" Theiss states, "it photographed one way - burnt orange or a gold. But in reality was another; the command shirts were definitely green." As further proof, look at the wrap-around tunics as well as the dress uniform tunics of Kirk's - all green. They came off as their true colors because they were constructed of different materials than the standard duty command shirts.

Okay, so the gold uniforms were green then, right? Well, it's still not that simple. Others, who witnessed third season tapings live have said that the uniforms were gold, just as they appeared onscreen. And in the Animated Star Trek series, the command uniforms were definitely drawn gold, and no explanations about lighting can change that.

One possible way to reconcile these stories is that, at some point, the green uniforms were changed to gold (why not, if that's what everyone was seeing anyway?). The question then would be when the change was made. Definitely by the time the Animated Series started. Possibly at the beginning of the 3rd Season when the uniform material was changed from velour to double knit. Or possibly even earlier than that.

Another question is what shade of green were the green uniforms. Theiss says lime, same as the wraparound. Let's compare a few pics side by side.

On the left we have Kirk's (indisputably) green wraparound shirt. In the middle, we have an early picture of Kirk modeling the "gold" command shirt, that Theiss says is the same colour as the wraparound, except that it looks different under studio lights. He's standing next to Charlie, wearing a tan tunic from the two pilot episodes. On the right, we have Gary Mitchell, wearing a tan tunic from the second pilot, and Kirk and Spock wearing "gold" pilot tunics.

Kirk and Spock's "gold" tunics from Where No Man Has Gone Before have always looked a tad on the greenish side. It's possible that these are the green uniforms that looked gold that Theiss spoke of, and that it was changed to real gold (since that's the way it looked onscreen anyway) right after the second pilot episode. If not, if Kirk's shirt in the middle picture is the same colour as his shirt in the left picture, then it absolutely doesn't show up that way on film and never did (for whatever reason). In that case, his shirt should be regarded as gold for story purposes. Just as his phaser is a phaser despite the fact that in real life it's just a wooden prop, his gold shirt is gold, despite the fact that in real life it might be green. (a bit of a kludge, but no worse than trying to explain why they changed it from green to gold, as they eventually did, one way or the other).

A further complicating factor is the proliferation of color corrected photos floating around. There are many pictures from Star Trek calendars and places like that that Kirk's shirt looking greenish. Apparently someone somewhere had heard that the shirt was green in real life and tried to correct for the fact that it looked gold on film. Unfortunately the corrections always seem to get it wrong and introduce a 3rd colour into the mix, that didn't exist either onscreen OR in real life. According to Theiss, the gold uniform was lime green, like the wraparound. In the corrected photos, (like the one at the top left of the page), it always comes out looking chartreuse. And in photos like that, the flesh tones always come out looking a bit wrong, as we can see if we take that same photo, and hit it with one step of cyan. When we do that, the uniform changes to the same mustard gold colour that it's always looked like onscreen, and Kirk's face looks less nauseous. (If they'd tried to correct it enough to make the uniform look lime, Kirk would probably have come out looking like Vina, the Green Orion Slave Girl.

The moral here is that if some of the uniforms really were green, there's just no way to make it look that way on film without screwing up the picture entirely. In that case, might as well just forget it and continue to regard the uniform as gold.

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