Borahae: how "I purple you" came to be

If you follow BTS, it's hard not to notice how tied the color purple is to the group and to ARMY. Purple hearts show up everywhere, concert halls turn into a sea of purple, and sometimes a single 💜 is enough for everyone to know exactly what you mean. It all started one night in 2016, and the best part is, V never planned any of it.

It was November 13, 2016, during BTS's 3rd Muster. ARMY had prepared a surprise for the members by turning the venue's lights purple. When V saw the whole crowd bathed in purple, he tried to give the color some meaning on the spot.

He said purple is the last color of the rainbow, and that's why, to him, it means trusting and loving for a long time, all the way to the end. It sounded like he was explaining some pre-existing symbolism, but then, laughing, he admitted he'd just made the whole thing up. Purple hadn't carried that meaning before that moment. He gave it that meaning, right there in front of the crowd.

That's where "borahae" (보라해) came from too. "Bora" means purple in Korean, and V played on the word "saranghae," meaning "I love you." That gave him a brand-new word, most commonly translated today as "I purple you." A literal translation can't fully capture what V meant by it, though, since his explanation built in trust that lasts a long time right from the start.

The phrase simply caught on after the Muster. The members kept using it, ARMY did too, and over time purple became so tied to BTS that it's now one of their most recognizable symbols. Even so, purple was never officially declared the fandom's color. Nobody proclaimed it as such. What's interesting is exactly that: its connection to BTS came about spontaneously, and stuck because ARMY embraced it.

How much that color came to mean to the fandom showed clearly in the 2018 Purple Ribbon Project. When BTS arrived in Los Angeles, ARMY used purple ribbons at the airport to create a path and keep distance between the members and the gathered crowd. The idea spread quickly on social media, and purple took on a very practical role in that case, helping their arrival go as smoothly and safely as possible.

Over time, "borahae" started showing up far beyond BTS concerts. UNICEF used it, it appeared in collaborations tied to the group, and well-known buildings were lit up purple to mark major BTS milestones. For BTS's tenth anniversary in 2023, purple took over a large part of Seoul, including some of its most famous landmarks.

The story got even more interesting when "borahae" ended up in front of Korea's intellectual property office. HYBE tried to register the phrase as a trademark, but the application wasn't approved. The ruling named Kim Taehyung, V, as the person who created the phrase. That doesn't mean the law simply "handed the word over to V," as the story sometimes gets retold on social media, but his authorship of the phrase was officially recognized.

And that's really the whole beauty of this story. One of the most recognizable phrases tied to BTS wasn't born in a marketing office, and it wasn't part of some pre-planned campaign. V simply saw a venue bathed in purple and, in that moment, tried to put into words what the sight meant to him. That spontaneous sentence gave us "borahae," a phrase that, almost ten years later, still connects BTS and ARMY. And sometimes a word isn't even needed anymore. A single 💜 is enough, and everyone knows what it means.