Medium Green
Retired1959-1969
Crafted between 1959 and 1969 - this iconic color choice opens the door to creative table arrangements, as its balanced green hue adds a refreshing touch to your dining setting. Combine Medium Green with complementary colors like crisp white or sunny yellow for a lively and cheerful ambiance, or create a nature-inspired theme by pairing it with earthy browns and subtle creams.
Production
Medium Green was retired in 1969, so it is a hunt for secondhand pieces now. Fiesta Factory Direct is where the colors still being made are, if you are filling a set.
Shop Fiesta Factory Direct (opens in a new tab)Notes on Medium Green
If you only learn one vintage color, make it this one. Medium Green arrived in 1959 and ran a decade to 1969 - but it was produced in far smaller quantities than the colors around it, and among collectors it's consistently the hardest vintage Fiesta color to find. A single Medium Green piece can be worth more than a full set of something common. It's a clean, mid-depth green, brighter and warmer than the Forest Green it followed. Modern Meadow is the closest thing Fiesta makes now and sits only a few ΔE away, which makes it useful for filling out a table - and worth being alert to in a mislabelled listing.
Using Medium Green on a table
Medium Green carries enough color to lead a table on its own. Use it for the plates and let quieter pieces do the rest; two or three settings of it go a long way. Its mid lightness (L* 59) means most food reads against it without either washing out or vanishing. It nearly disappears against a white cloth (3.3:1), so it shows best on dark wood or a colored runner.
Below, 5 combinations built only from colors Fiesta has actually produced. Each says which rule it follows, and which pieces you can still buy today.
Buy these to go with it
Medium Green was retired in 1969, but these are all in production now - the set you can actually finish buying.
Opposite on the wheel
Mulberry sits roughly opposite Medium Green in hue, which is the highest-contrast pairing the palette offers. The neutrals keep it from shouting.
All green
Every color here is from the green family, arranged light to dark. A single-family table reads calm and deliberate rather than busy.
- Sea Mist Green
- Lemongrass
-
Your color Medium Green
- Evergreen
Three-way split
Twilight and Rose sit about a third of the way around the color wheel from Medium Green in each direction. Evenly spaced hues stay lively without any one taking over.
- White
- Rose, 1951-1959
-
Your color Medium Green
- Twilight
Next-door hues
These sit within about 55° of Medium Green on the color wheel. Neighboring hues blend instead of competing, which suits a table you want to feel warm rather than sharp.
- Sea Mist Green
- Lemongrass
-
Your color Medium Green
- Jade
Where Medium Green sits in the line
Medium Green took over from Forest Green as Fiesta's green, and is noticeably lighter than it - a clearly different glaze rather than a reformulation (ΔE 18.5). In 1959 it arrived alongside Red, 1959-1972 and took the place of Chartreuse, 1951-1959, Forest Green, Gray and Rose, 1951-1959 on the shelf. What else happened in 1959 →
Closest colors in the palette
Ranked by CIEDE2000 (ΔE) against Medium Green. Under about ΔE 5 two colors are hard to tell apart side by side - useful when you are identifying an unmarked piece.
On the table alongside Medium Green
9 colors were in production at the same time: