Context - This is a proposal from Google based on our experience consuming schema.org Product markup and working with similar data from online merchants. If it were accepted, it would make it easier for us and others to understand the colors of products sold online.

Proposal - Schema.org supports the specification of product colors through property color of type Text. A disadvantage of only allowing a free-form textual description of a color is that it provides a lot of room for interpretation. For example "Charcoal" and "Ash" are both shades of the color Gray, but it is hard for a user to understand the difference just based on the textual description. Many popular apparel websites therefore show a color swatch image together with the color name to allow the user to visualize the color of a product variant.

Given the common use of color swatches in the industry we propose to add a new colorSwatch property as sub-property of image with values of type URL or ImageObject.