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, 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 began to commonly be used as a term for a color in France beginning approximately 1855–60; the writer Edmond de Goncourt used it in the novel La Fille Elisacode: fra promoted to code: fr in 1877. The first recorded use of beige as a color name in English was in 1887.

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