Literary authors have often employed the color of the chameleon as a metaphor for change, ambiguity, and the fluidity of identity. In some texts the creature’s shifting hues serve as a vivid image of surfaces caught in light—for instance, one work notes that “surfaces so sensitive to illumination hardly admit of more accusable tint than a chameleon” [1]—while another compares unreliable promises to “the color of the chameleon” [2]. In scientific as well as poetic contexts, writers draw on its mutable tints, as seen when the “varying tints of the chameleon” are evoked to illustrate nature’s capacity for transformation [3] and when characters are said to adopt a “chameleon hue” that changes with every distant view [4]. Even depictions of the creature itself underscore this theme, with one passage describing a chameleon that is “of the bright-green color of the leaves” [5] and another lamenting the difficulty of fixing its ever-changing hues [6]. Collectively, these examples show how the chameleon color has become a powerful symbol for instability and transformation in literature.