Pigments, dyes, and transition-metal compounds are made in courses across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, but student characterization of these compounds' most striking features, their colors, seldom goes beyond verbal descriptions. Affordable, hand-held, fiber-optic reflectance spectrophotometers make it possible to advance students' understanding of color. Reflectance spectra provide graphical information about color, whereas CIE "L*a*b*" color coordinates describe color quantitatively. This article describes how collection and interpretation of reflectance data are used to round out pigment syntheses in a course for nonscience majors. This approach is transferrable to any experiment in which students obtain colored solids.