The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  Purple’s special status wasn’t confined to the West. In Japan a deep purple, murasaki, was kin-jiki, or a forbidden color, off-limits to ordinary people.5 In the 1980s the Mexican government allowed a Japanese company, Purpura Imperial, to collect the local caracol sea snail for kimono dyeing. (Unsurprisingly, a similar Japanese species, Rapana bezoar, is vanishingly rare.) While the local Mixtec people, who had been using the caracol for centuries, milked the snails of their purple, leaving them alive, Purpura Imperial’s method was rather more fatal for the snails, and the population went into freefall. After years of lobbying the contract was revoked.6

  Like many special things, purple has always been a greedy consumer of resources. Not only have billions of shellfish paid dearly to clothe the wealthy; sources of slow-growing lichens like Roccella tinctoria, used to make archil [here], have been overexploited, forcing people to look further afield or do without. Even mauve required vast quantities of raw produce: in the early stages it was so demanding of scarce raw material that its creator, William Perkin, later admitted that the whole enterprise was close to being abandoned.7

  Luckily for Perkin, his new dye became immensely fashionable, and the prospect of the fortunes to be made meant that an explosion of other aniline colors followed swiftly on mauve’s heels. Whether this was also good for purple is another matter. Suddenly everyone had access to purple at a reasonable price, but they also had access to thousands of other colors too. Familiarity bred contempt, and purple became a color much like any other.

  Tyrian purple

  One of the most notorious seductions in history took place in late 48 B.C. Shortly before, on August 9, Julius Caesar had defeated the far larger army of his rival and son-in-law Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus. Now he was in Egypt, and the most famous woman in the world, less than half his age, had smuggled herself past his guards and into his apartment rolled in a rug. When, nine months later, Cleopatra gave birth to a son called Caesarion, “Little Caesar,” the proud father returned to Rome and promptly introduced a new toga, which only he was allowed to wear, in his paramour’s favorite color: Tyrian purple.1

  This rich tone—ideally the color of clotted blood, according to Pliny—was the product of two varieties of shellfish native to the Mediterranean, Thais haemastoma and Murex brandaris. Were one to crack open the shell of one of these spiky, carnivorous gastropods, one would see a pale hypobranchial gland or “bloom” transecting its body. If this were squeezed, a single drop of clear liquid, smelling of garlic, would be released. Within moments, the sunlight would turn the liquid first pale yellow, then sea green, then blue, and finally a dark purple-red. The best color, so deep it was tinged with blackness, was obtained by mixing the fluids from both kinds of shellfish.2 Getting the color to adhere and permeate cloth involved a long and foul-smelling process. The liquid harvested from the shellfish glands was placed in a vat of stale urine (for the ammonia) and allowed to ferment for 10 days before the cloth was added; some accounts recommended treating cloth to two separate baths.3

  The earliest evidence of Tyrian dyeing comes from the fifteenth century B.C.4 The odor of rotting sea snails, aging urine, and the fermenting mixture must have been overpowering—archaeologists have tended to find ancient dyeworks relegated to the outskirts of towns and cities. The dye was particularly associated with the Phoenicians, from Tyre, who gave it fame and made a fortune trading it across the region. Tyrian-dyed cloth is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad (c. 1260–1180 B.C.) and Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 29–19 B.C.) and depictions of it have also been found in ancient Egypt.

  The color’s popularity was terrible news for the Murex and Thais. Since each specimen contained a single drop, it took around 250,000 to make an ounce of dye.5 The piles of shells discarded millennia ago are so large they have become geographical features littered along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The huge labor involved—each snail, for example, had to be caught by hand—had two, interrelated effects. The first was to make Tyrian purple eye-wateringly expensive. In the mid-fourth century B.C. it cost as much as silver; soon enough, Tyrian-dipped cloth was literally worth its weight in gold. By the third century, one Roman emperor told his wife he could not afford to buy her a Tyrian dress.6

  The second was to associate the color with power and royalty. In republican Rome it was a tightly constrained badge of status. Triumphant generals could wear a purple-and-gold robe; those in the field, plain purple. Senators, consuls, and praetors (a kind of magistrate) wore a broad Tyrian band on their togas; knights, a narrow band.7 This visual hierarchy changed upon Caesar’s return to Rome, when the rules became even more draconian. By the fourth century A.D. only the emperor was allowed to wear Tyrian purple; anyone else caught wearing it could face death.8 Once, the emperor Nero saw a woman in mollusk-mauve at a recital. He had her dragged from the room, stripped naked, and relieved of her property, so seriously did he equate the color with imperial power. Diocletian, a Roman ruler who was more pragmatic (or perhaps just greedier) than the others, said that anyone could wear the color, just so long as they could afford the exorbitant fee and all the profit went to him.9 Farther east, Byzantine queens gave birth in wine-dark rooms so that the royal offspring were said to be born “in the purple,” thus cementing their right to rule.

  Fortunately for the poor snails, international politics and fate granted them a reprieve before they could be wiped out completely. In 1453 Constantinople, the capital of the Roman and Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and with it was lost the secret of the manufacture of the world’s finest purple. It was another four centuries before an obscure French marine biologist called Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers stumbled across the murex and its purple.10 The year, though, was 1856: the very same year in which another shade of purple, mauve [here], went into production.

  Archil

  Color can be found in the most unpromising of places. Archil (alias: orchil, orchell, tournesol, orcein, and cudbear) is a dark red-purple dye, made from lichens. Most people know lichen when they see it growing flatly on bricks or the bark of trees, but few take much notice. On closer inspection, lichen proves more intriguing. It is not a single organism but usually two, typically a fungus and an alga, living in a symbiotic relationship so close that it takes a microscope to distinguish one from the other.1

  Several lichens can be used to make dye. Early modern Dutch dyers produced one called lac or litmus, which they sold in the form of small, dark blue cakes. (Lichens are very sensitive to differing pH levels; and doctors could grind up various species and use them to test the acidity of a patient’s urine, hence “litmus test.”) The one principally used for archil is called Roccella tinctoria. Seen clinging to a rock, it does not look very promising at all. Like most of the archil-producing lichens, it is a nasty buff-gray color, and it grows in small clumps that resemble pallid seaweed. Lichens such as this grow in many places, including the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Scotland, and various small sites in Africa, the Levant, and South America.2

  The secret of archil production seems to have been lost to the West until the fourteenth century, when an Italian merchant called Federigo traveled to the Levant and discovered the tinting properties of the local lichens.3 On his return to Florence, he began using the lichens to dye wools and silks the much-loved, rich purple color that had previously been associated only with the (much more expensive) Murex pigments. Federigo’s enterprise made him rich. His family, sensing a branding opportunity, changed their name to Ruccellis.4 Gradually knowledge of the dye spread, first to other Italian dyers—a fifteenth-century Venetian dyers’ manual devotes four chapters to it—and then to other European countries.

  Making archil was arduous. First a source had to be discovered, and because lichen populations proved so fragile, each site was quickly exhausted.5 To feed the market, lichens were imported at great expense from increasingly far-flung locations as trade routes and empires blossomed.6 The lichens had to be carefully harvested by hand—in May and June
for some varieties, August for others—and ground to a fine powder. The following stages were even more finicky. The two essential ingredients are ammonia and time. For much of the period that archil was produced, the most readily available source of ammonia was putrid human urine. A Venetian recipe from 1540 calls for 100 pounds of powdered archil and 10 pounds of an alum such as potash to be mixed with urine until it was the consistency of dough. This had to be kneaded frequently, up to three times a day—adding wine when it got too dry—and kept in a warm place for up to 70 days. After which time, “it will have become so thick that it will be good to use.”7 Even modern recipes require up to 28 days to produce the right color.8

  Some lichens were said to smell wonderful—like violets—as they developed into a dye, but even so it must often have been unpleasant, stinky, and labor-intensive work. The rewards, though, were the colors produced at the end. One was a full-blooded purple fit for royalty; another was much redder. In one telling story, when the Napoleonic army landed in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, in February 1797, the invading army was spooked by the sight of a group of Welsh women wearing rosy lichen-dyed cloaks. Mistaking them for a crack troop of redcoats, the invaders scattered without having fired so much as a single shot.

  Magenta

  During the latter half of the nineteenth century, while waves of settlers were busy colonizing one frontier in America, another Wild West–style struggle was surreptitiously being waged across Europe. The spoils at stake in this European contest, though, were not territories, but colors.

  The colors in question were the aniline dyes, a family of synthetic colorants produced from sticky, black coal tar. The name aniline came from anil, Spanish for indigo [here], coined in 1826 by Otto Unverdorben, a German chemist who had been working on isolating the indigo plant’s colorant in his lab. The first synthetic aniline to be created was the startlingly purple mauve [here], which was accidentally discovered by a London teenager in 1853. This, though, was only the beginning. It was immediately obvious that aniline had a good deal more to offer the world of color. Across the world, scientists began feverishly testing the new compound with anything and everything they could get their hands on.

  One of the first to strike it lucky was François-Emmanuel Verguin. He had been the director of a factory that produced yellow from picric acid, but in 1858 he joined a rival firm, Renard Frères & Franc, and, almost immediately, created a rich color on the cusp between red and purple by mixing aniline with tin chloride.1 He called his new creation fuchsine, after the flower [here]. Almost simultaneously, the British firm Simpson, Maule & Nicholson hit upon aniline red. This eye-searing color was an immediate success. The first customers, intriguingly, were several European armies, who used it to dye their uniforms. The names though—“fuchsia” in France and “roseine” in Britain—would not do for so dashing and assertive a hue. Instead it became known as “magenta,” in honor of the small Italian town near Milan where, on June 4, 1859, the Franco-Piedmontese army had won a decisive victory against the Austrians.

  Soon magenta was pouring out of rival factories in Mulhouse, Basel, London, Coventry, and Glasgow, and onto the backs of a public hungering for bright, affordable new clothing. Within the space of a few years a slew of other anilines—a yellow, two shades of violet, aldehyde green, bleu de Lyon, bleu de Paris, Nicholson’s blue, dahlia (somewhere between mauve and magenta), and a black—had flooded the market. Regulars at the Black Horse pub, an establishment a stone’s throw from Perkin’s dyeworks at Greenford Green, were fond of saying that their stretch of the Grand Junction Canal turned a different color each week.2

  All this experimentation, sadly, contained the seeds for magenta’s decline in fashion. For the next decade the industry was paralyzed by a succession of lawsuits, as firms began trying to enforce their patents and guard their intellectual property. Verguin himself profited little from his creation: his contract at Renard Frères & Franc had signed over the rights to any color he created in return for one-fifth of the profits.3 In the early twentieth century it was discovered that a number of these miraculous new colors contained dangerous levels of arsenic, up to 6.5 percent in some samples of magenta. More subtly, so much choice led to consumer neophilia; magenta was now one option among thousands. Its survival is largely thanks to color printing. The color is associated almost exclusively with the (decidedly pink) process ink used in CMYK color printing.

  Mauve

  Malaria was rife in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1740s Horace Walpole wrote, with the preoccupation typical of a beleaguered tourist, of “a horrid thing called the mal’aria that comes to Rome every summer and kills one.” (The word malaria is a corruption of the Italian for “bad air,” as it was believed the disease was airborne; the connection with mosquitoes wasn’t established until later.) Half of all the patients admitted to St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1853 were diagnosed with ague, or malarial fevers.1

  Quinine, the only known treatment, was extracted from the bark of a particular South American tree and cost a fortune: the East India Company spent around $123,000 on it annually.2 The financial incentives for synthesizing quinine were obvious. It was partly these, and partly a love of chemistry for its own sake, that drove an 18-year-old scientist to spend his holidays holed up in a makeshift laboratory in his father’s East London attic, trying to synthesize quinine from coal tar. Today, William Perkin is celebrated as one of the heroes of modern science. It is not because of quinine, which he never did manage to produce, but because of a rich seam of chemistry that opened up when he accidentally happened upon a particular shade of purple: mauve.

  In the first few months of 1856 Perkin’s experiments with coal tar, the abundant, oily black by-product of gas lighting, resulted in a reddish powder, which, when further experimented on, produced not colorless quinine, but a bright purple liquid.3 Most chemists would have thrown this errant slop away. Perkin, who had once dreamed of being an artist, dipped a piece of silk into his beaker, and realized that he had made a light- and washproof dye. Sensing its commercial possibilities, he initially named his creation after the exclusive color that had been extracted from mollusks by the ancient Greeks and Byzantines [here]. Soon after, however, he adopted instead the French name for the mallow plant, mauve, whose blooms are a similar hue.4

  It was not an immediate success. Dyers, used to working with plant and animal extracts, were dubious of the newfangled chemical. It was also expensive to make. It took 100 pounds of coal to produce just 10 ounces of coal tar, which in turn yielded only a quarter ounce of mauve.5 Thankfully for Perkin and for us (without his perseverance, it is possible that coal tar might have been abandoned before the discovery of modern commonplaces, including hair dyes, chemotherapy, saccharin and artificial musk), the spoiled, extravagant wife of Napoleon III, Empress Eugénie, decided that the color mauve precisely matched her eyes. The Illustrated London News notified its readers of the world’s most fashionable woman’s preference for Perkin’s purple in 1857. Queen Victoria took note, and chose to wear “a rich mauve velvet [dress], trimmed with three rows of lace” with a matching petticoat—“mauve and silver moiré antique, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace”—to her daughter’s marriage to Prince Frederick William in January 1858.6 By August 1859 Punch declared that London was “in the grip of the Mauve Measles” and 21-year-old Perkin had become a rich and well-respected man.7

  Soon enough, however, mauve went into that most Victorian of things: a decline. Overconsumption, as well as the continuing loyalty of an older generation, meant that the color soon became shorthand for a particular kind of aging lady. “Never trust a woman who wears mauve,” Oscar Wilde declared in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. “It always means they have a history.” Our current queen, perhaps bearing this stigma in mind, vetoed blooms of this color in palace flower arrangements. More carefree characters, though, have refused to be put off. Neil Munro Roger, the dandy couturier, who
invented capri pants and was known to everyone by his childhood nickname of Bunny, was partial to what he liked to call “menopausal mauve.” It had become such a signature that at the Amethyst Ball he threw to celebrate his 70th birthday, he wore it from egret-feathered top to glimmering catsuited toe.

  Heliotrope

  Some colors loom larger in the popular imagination than in real life. Take heliotrope: a plant whose name was forged from two Greek components, helios, “sun,” and tropaios, “to turn,” because its purple flowers were supposed to turn and follow the sun as it moved across the sky. The color, in turn, takes its name from the plant’s blooms. Really, however, this shrub doesn’t follow the light much more than any other, and the most distinctive thing about Heliotropium is its sweet, cherry-pie scent. An early ancestor of the plant was used as a perfume ingredient in ancient Egypt and traded with Greece and Rome.1

  The color’s apogee came toward the end of the nineteenth century, the boom time for many shades of purple. Part of the color’s appeal was novelty. Before William Perkin’s mauve [here], purple had been difficult to produce, and still retained the imperial glamour of its ancient status, so perhaps the Victorians should be forgiven for the increasingly lurid combinations heliotrope appeared in over the next decade. In 1880 it was paired with light green or apricot; later it was partnered with canary yellow, eucalyptus green, art bronze, and peacock blue. “No colors seem too bright,” as one commentator put it. “The combinations of them are sometimes quite startling.”2