Scott R724 Orange?

Was confused about this stamp since it's suppose to be carmine? Sorry new to stamps and don't really have a lot of the same stamp to compare it too so I used a revenue carmine for comparison. If it was bleached somehow, wouldn't the serial number also be much lighter?









The back does seem to be a little bit lighter, but would that really cause that much of a dramatic change in color or am I missing something?

Thanks for the help!

My opinion is it appears to be a color 'changling', a stamp that has been exposed to either sunlight or a chemical which has changed the carmine to the orange you are seeing. I would lean towards sunlight fade, the black might not be as fugitive as the carmine ink. But perhaps some of the revenue guys will weigh in with a more definitive answer.
Don

The Grant stamp was not issued in carmine. It is an R246b issued in orange; this is the variety with blue numbers instead of green. It is not one of the "reds".

Cool, I did t know the grant was t printed in carmine, so it's not faded. But I don't think anyone who would look at it in person would say there was any tinge of blue in the number.

The numbers are clearly blue. They are not bright green.

A look at the Scott Specialized shows that R246 comes with two different color serial numbers, green (the primary listing) and blue (the R246b listing). As Bart has noted, the scan clearly does not show the green serial numbers. Some of the blue serials are certainly very dark, seemingly close to black. That seems to be the case in your scan. A look under natural sunlight would probably convince us all that these are the blue serials.

Although I do not have my records readily at hand, I believe that the lowest serials were green, that at some point BEP changed to the dark blue, and that later they returned to the green serials. I have that sequence documented for the Future Delivery overprints in my collection. While I have not attempted to do that for the general documentary stamps, I suspect that the switching colors (perhaps back to blue a second time?) could also be documented with a larger collection of these than I have.