Cream vs. Beige

Main Difference

The main difference between Cream and Beige is that the Cream is a dairy product and Beige is a brown color with a cream colored tone; pale yellowish brown color.

• Cream

  Cream is a dairy product composed of the higher-butterfat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. In un-homogenized milk, the fat, which is less dense, will eventually rise to the top. In the industrial production of cream, this process is accelerated by using centrifuges called “separators”. In many countries, cream is sold in several grades depending on the total butterfat content. Cream can be dried to a powder for shipment to distant markets. Cream has high levels of saturated fat.

  Cream skimmed from milk may be called “sweet cream” to distinguish it from whey cream skimmed from whey, a by-product of cheese-making. Whey cream has a lower fat content and tastes more salty, tangy and “cheesy”. In many countries, cream is usually sold partially fermented: sour cream, crème fraîche, and so on.

  Cream has many culinary uses in sweet, bitter, salty and tangy dishes.

  Cream produced by cattle (particularly Jersey cattle) grazing on natural pasture often contains some natural carotenoid pigments derived from the plants they eat; this gives the cream a slight yellow tone, hence the name of the yellowish-white color, cream. This is also the origin of butter’s yellow color. Cream from goat’s milk, or from cows fed indoors on grain or grain-based pellets, is white.

• Beige

  Beige is variously described as a pale sandy fawn color, a grayish tan, a light-grayish yellowish brown, or a pale to grayish yellow. It takes its name from French, where the word originally meant natural wool that has been neither bleached nor dyed, and hence also the color of natural wool. It has come to be used to describe a variety of light tints chosen for their neutral or pale warm appearance.

  Beige was used as a color term in the modern sense in France beginning approximately 1855-60; the writer Edmond de Goncourt used it in the novel La Fille Elisa in 1877. The first recorded use of beige as a color name in English was in 1887.Beginning in the 1920s, the meaning of beige expanded so that it is now also used not only for pale yellowish-brown colors, but also for a wide range of pale brown and light brown shades. Some of more notable of these tints and shades are shown below.

  Beige is notoriously difficult to produce in traditional offset CMYK printing due to the low levels of inks used on each plate; often it will print in purple or green and vary within a print run.

• Beige (noun)

  a pale sandy fawn colour

  “a beige raincoat”

  “tones of beige and green”