Amber as shown in the color box at right is a pure chroma color on the color wheel halfway between orange and yellow. It is a color that is 75% yellow and 25% red.
The first recorded use of amber as a color name in English was in 1500.
Amber is one of several technically-defined colors used in automotive signal lamps. In North America, SAE standard J578 governs the colorimetry of vehicle lights, while outside North America the internationalized European ECE regulations hold force. Both standards designate a range of orange and yellow hues in the CIE colorspace as "amber". In the past, the ECE amber definition was more restrictive than the SAE definition, but the current ECE definition is identical to the more permissive SAE standard. The SAE formally uses the term "yellow amber", though the color is most often referred to as "yellow". This is not the same as selective yellow, a color used in some fog lamps and headlamps.
Previously, ECE amber was defined according to the 1968 Convention on Road Traffic, as follows:
| Limit towards green | |
| Limit towards red | |
| Limit towards white |
Recent revisions to the ECE regulations have aligned ECE Amber with SAE Yellow, defined as follows:
| Limit towards green | |
| Limit towards red | |
| Limit towards white |
The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries. The color swatch to the right is a desaturated approximation, created by taking the centroid of the standard definition and moving it towards the D65 white point, until it meets the sRGB gamut triangle.
