tall man is right, my example is incomplete and incoherent ( it was late), but luckily, you got it exactly, Zaxo.

btw, I do construct the graph, I just missed that in the example, trying to keep it minimal.

One clarification, my input data would look more like:

my @combos = (
               [qw(black white)],
               [qw(red white)],
               [qw(cyan red)],
               [qw(yellow blue)],
               [qw(magenta green blue)],
               [qw(cyan periwinkle raspberry)],
              );
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so not all the vertices are connected, and in fact what I need to get out of this are the sets that are. so what I do is:

sub r {
    my $g = shift;
    my $v = shift;
    my @ns = $g->neighbors($v);
    print $v."\n";
    $g->delete_vertex($v);
    foreach my $n (@ns){
        r($g, $n);
    }
}

while (scalar $g->vertices > 0){
    print "next set:\n";
    r($g, ($g->vertices)[0]);
}
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This however doesn't seem terribly elegant (or efficient), am I anywhere near what I should be doing in this case?

and thanks for your great help!