Red, Yellow and Orange Flags

Which countries have red, yellow and orange flags?

No flag uses exactly these three warm colors. The two flags that contain all of them are Andorra and Sri Lanka, and both need extra colors to work.

Andorra has vertical blue, yellow and red bands with the national coat of arms in the center. Sri Lanka has a golden lion holding a sword on a maroon panel, set beside two stripes in orange and green, and surrounded by a yellow border. The orange stripe represents the Tamil community, and the green stripe the Muslim community.

Warm combinations such as red with yellow are common, and red-and-yellow flags appear in Spain, Vietnam and Montenegro. Orange is the unusual part, since it is one of the least used colors in national flags.

Why is orange so rare on flags?

Orange is hard to separate from red and yellow when a flag is seen from far away or in poor light, and many design traditions treat the three as too close for strong contrast. Most national flags choose red or yellow instead, and keep orange for flags where it has a specific meaning.

Where orange does appear, it usually has a clear story. Ireland's orange stands for the Protestant tradition and green for the Catholic one. India uses saffron for courage and sacrifice. Niger and Ivory Coast use it for the Sahara and the savanna, and Bhutan uses it for its Buddhist tradition. Cyprus shows an orange island on white. These flags tend to combine orange with white and green rather than red and yellow, which is why red, yellow and orange together are almost never found.

How can you tell similar flags apart?

Look for the emblem. Andorra has a coat of arms in the center of vertical bands, and Sri Lanka has a lion and a sword on a maroon panel. Flags that look like red-yellow-orange at first glance are often red-yellow flags such as Spain, Vietnam or North Macedonia, or orange-green-white flags such as Ireland and India. Use the grid above to compare the real colors side by side.