The most colourful national flag depends on how you count. Belize's flag contains 12 colours, the most of any national flag, because its coat of arms includes two woodcutters, a mahogany tree, tools and a shield. Among flags without an emblem, South Africa and South Sudan lead with six colours each. Seychelles, Comoros, Guyana, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic and Saint Kitts and Nevis follow with five. Most of the world's flags use only two or three.
How to Count a Flag's Colours
Ranking flags by colour needs two rules settled first. The first is whether an emblem counts. A coat of arms can hold a dozen shades in a small space, so flags that carry one, such as Belize, Ecuador and Mexico, always come out on top if every shade is counted. The second is what counts as a colour. Most counts include black and white and treat shades such as gold and yellow as one colour. This guide uses those conventions and reports each flag's field colours separately from its emblem.
| Flag | Colours | Where they come from |
|---|---|---|
| Belize | 12 | Coat of arms on a blue field with red edges |
| South Africa | 6 | Field only; no emblem |
| South Sudan | 6 | Field and one star |
| Dominica | 6+ | Field, cross and a parrot |
| Seychelles | 5 | Five oblique bands |
| Comoros | 5 | Four stripes and a triangle |
| Guyana | 5 | The "Golden Arrowhead" |
| Zimbabwe | 5 | Stripes, triangle and a bird |
| Central African Republic | 5 | Four stripes, a band and a star |
| Saint Kitts and Nevis | 5 | Diagonal band and two stars |
Some colourful flags pack meaning into their details as well as their colour counts. Belize's coat of arms is surrounded by a wreath of 50 leaves, which recall 1950, the year the independence movement began. Dominica's flag has a ring of ten green stars around its parrot, one for each of the island's ten parishes. Both designs show why emblem flags score so high on colour: every symbol in them is drawn in its natural colours.
The Six-Colour Club: South Africa and South Sudan
South Africa's flag, in red, blue, green, black, gold and white, was designed in a hurry. Public competitions had failed to produce a design everyone accepted, and with the April 1994 election weeks away, state herald Frederick Brownell drew the Y-shaped design. It was adopted as an interim flag for the transition. Its colours bring together those of the African National Congress (black, green and gold) and the orange, white and blue of the old flag, with orange changed to red. The flag was popular enough that the interim status was quietly dropped. Officially, the colours have no assigned meaning, so no single interpretation is authorised. The design is explained in full in our guide to the flag of South Africa.
South Sudan's flag, black, white, red, green, blue and yellow, was the flag of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement during the civil war and became the national flag at independence in July 2011. The black, red and green, divided by white stripes, recall the Kenyan flag and Pan-African colours. The blue triangle stands for the waters of the Nile, and the yellow star stands for the unity of the states.
Belize and the Coat-of-Arms Flags
Belize's flag is the most colourful of all. On a royal blue field with red stripes top and bottom sits a white disc holding the national coat of arms: two woodcutters, one of them holding an axe and the other a paddle, standing either side of a shield showing tools and a sailing ship, with a mahogany tree above and the motto Sub Umbra Floreo ("I flourish in the shade") below. The woodcutters honour the logging trade that built the colony of British Honduras, and the red stripes were added at independence in 1981.
Other flags with a coat of arms also count high. Mexico's eagle, perched on a cactus and holding a serpent, adds browns, golds and a green wreath to the green, white and red field. Ecuador's coat of arms includes a condor, a steamship and a snow-capped Chimborazo. Dominica's flag has a green field with a cross of yellow, black and white, and a red disc in the centre holding a Sisserou parrot drawn in green and purple. That makes Dominica one of only two national flags to use purple.
Five-Colour Flags
Seychelles adopted its flag in 1996. It has five bands, blue, yellow, red, white and green, fanning out from the lower hoist corner, a layout no other national flag uses. Guyana's "Golden Arrowhead" of 1966 was designed by the American vexillologist Whitney Smith, who also coined the word "vexillology". It places a red triangle edged in black over a gold arrowhead edged in white, on a green field. Officially the colours stand for the forests and farmland, the rivers, mineral wealth, zeal and endurance.
Comoros has four stripes, yellow, white, red and blue, one for each of the four islands the country claims, including Mayotte, which is still French. A green triangle carries a crescent and four stars. The Central African Republic flag of 1958 by Barthélemy Boganda crosses four horizontal stripes with a red vertical band. The design deliberately combines the French tricolour with Pan-African colours in the hope of uniting the two. Zimbabwe (1980) and Saint Kitts and Nevis (1983) complete the group.
Turkmenistan: The Most Intricate, Not the Most Colourful
Turkmenistan's flag uses only three main colours, green, white and red, but it is usually called the most complicated flag in the world. The red band near the hoist contains five carpet designs called guls, one for each of the main tribes: Teke, Yomut, Arsary, Chowdur and Saryk. An olive wreath below them was added in 1997 to mark the country's neutrality, recognised by the UN in 1995. The flag's proportions have also changed, from 1:2 to the current 2:3 in 2001. Each gul is a detailed geometric pattern, so the flag is extremely hard to draw from memory. See our guide to the flag of Turkmenistan for each tribe's design.
The Rare Colours
Purple is the rarest colour on national flags. It appears only on Dominica's parrot and in the rainbow on Nicaragua's emblem. The usual explanation is historical: Tyrian purple dye was so expensive for so long that no flag tradition developed around it, and by the time synthetic purple existed, most national colour schemes were already fixed. Orange is also uncommon, found mainly on India, Ireland, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Bhutan's is the most striking use: the flag is split diagonally into yellow and orange, with a white dragon lying along the dividing line. No national flag uses pink. Maroon is rare too, found on Qatar, Latvia and Sri Lanka; Qatar's is traditionally explained as the colour its red dye turned after long exposure to the sun.
Weapons are also rare. Mozambique's flag is the only one with a modern assault rifle, an AK-47 with a bayonet crossed over a hoe on an open book. Guatemala's flag shows two crossed nineteenth-century rifles, and Haiti's coat of arms includes cannons and muskets.
Flags That Changed Colour
Flag colours are not fixed. Libya flew a plain green flag from 1977 to 2011, the only single-colour national flag of modern times, before restoring its tricolour of red, black and green. Rwanda dropped the red, yellow and green of its independence flag in 2001, replacing it with blue, yellow and green and a sun, partly to break with symbols associated with the 1994 genocide. Malawi changed its rising sun to a full white sun in 2010 and reverted to the original design in 2012. Changes like these are usually political statements, which is part of why flags are so rarely redesigned.
Same Colours, Different Countries
With so few standard colours, some flags end up almost identical. Chad and Romania both use vertical blue, yellow and red stripes. Chad's blue is a slightly darker indigo, and the two countries have discussed the problem without changing either flag. Indonesia and Monaco both use red over white and differ only in proportions, 2:3 against 4:5. The Netherlands and Luxembourg both use red, white and blue stripes, with Luxembourg's blue a lighter shade. You can see the Chad and Romania comparison side by side on our page for the flag of Chad.
Why Most Designers Stop at Three
The North American Vexillological Association's 2006 booklet Good Flag, Bad Flag advises two or three basic colours from a standard set. A flag has to be recognisable from a distance, easy to draw and cheap to reproduce, and every extra colour works against all three. That is why the colourful flags stand out: each extra colour was a choice to say something specific about the country.
The Olympic rings show the opposite approach. Pierre de Coubertin chose blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background in 1913 because those six colours, taken together, could reproduce every national flag of the time. The approach works for rings but would make a poor flag. Red is the most common flag colour of all, and our survey of flags with red lists them.