Ancient Egyptian wadju — ground malachite — was a copper-carbonate green used as eye paint and on tomb-wall plaster, bound in fat and stroked along the lid like kohl. The real mineral is a muted, banded teal-green, not the electric synthetic dye that borrowed its name.

This system reads the pigment the way it was actually seen: a muted mineral green sitting on a deep green-black stone ground, framed by inscriptional serifs and fine gilt lines rather than floated on clean white.