A Brief History of Colors

Pigments and dyes have come from all manner of animals, vegetables and minerals. From ochre to cochineal red to the rarest of purples, color has been an important part of human life for centuries. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
trazy and I'm holly trying. And we have gotten so many,
so so many listener requests to talk about the history

(00:23):
of a specific color. Um. Most recently it was Nicole
who asked us to talk about the creation of the
color move And before that we had Dora who asked
us to talk about pillet, which is a blue dye
that's really important in the Jewish tradition. He wrote an
entire book on that one, and he sent us a
review copy of it about a year ago. I'm absolutely

(00:46):
certain we've gotten requests to talk about cockeneal red and
a general history of the color blue. And I think
those must have been on Facebook or Twitter, because I
can't find them in our inbox, um in either of
their inboxes. Actually, if you've been checking out of our
episodes before, were the very end. Our email address now
is History Podcast at how stuff works dot com, So

(01:06):
if you send it to Discovery, we will not get it.
We won't get it. So we also very recently had
a listener named have Lah asked if we might talk
about a general history of color or of dies, and
so that's where we are today. A lot of these
other specific requests that people have made of us are
going to come up today. Um, but this is sort

(01:26):
of an overview of dies and pigments and how we've
been using them during or throughout history, which I love
because I love color and you know, style and art
and all the other people. The nice, nice follow up
to our recent makeup episode which featured lots of color talk.

(01:48):
So it all makes sense. So, uh, animal, vegetable or
mineral could almost be a guessing game about pigments and dies.
People have been using all of these to try to
make things prettier all the way back into prehistory. Are
they most of the world people have had a lot
of them to choose from. If there wasn't a plant
source of red, there could be an animal. And if

(02:08):
there were neither of those, perhaps they had a mineral
that they could source for red color. So to start, ochre,
which is made of iron oxide, is found abundantly all
over the planet. Iron oxide itself is one of their
most common minerals, and ochre is probably the thing that
people used to make their clothing and surroundings more colorful

(02:29):
before they used anything else. That was probably the first pigment,
and ochre produces a range of earthy kind of yellow
brown to red brown colors. It was used in some
of the world's oldest cave paintings, so when you imagine those,
you can pretty quickly conjure what ochre looks like and
what the various levels of saturation of it looked like.
And it was also used in textiles. We have evidence

(02:52):
that prehistoric people's also used it to dye animal skins.
And while it's been used all over the world throughout history,
in particular the Maori of New Zealand have traditionally used
ochre extensively. They've used it on their faces and hair,
on their canoes and homes, and on the bones of
the dead. There's also in the yellow family saffron, which

(03:13):
comes from the dried stigmas of crocuses um. This makes
really rich yellows and oranges, and one of its most
recognizable uses as a die is in the garments of
Buddhist monks. Saffron has a really long history of its own.
It could almost go in the later part of this
episode when we're gonna be talking about a few colors
that have a longer history, but just as much of

(03:36):
its history is about being a spice and a medicine
as it is about being a die. I'm just having
a moment where I'm remembering my mom's awesome saffron bread.
As we talked about the saffron. Saffron rice is also diligous,
so good uh Mata root can make all kinds of
shades of reds and yellows. Cinnabar, which is a sulfide mineral,

(03:57):
has been used to make red as well, although it
is unfortunately toxic. So is lead, which we also talked
about in our cosmetics episode, which has also sometimes been
used to make red paints. In Europe, people used woade
to make blue and purple dyes for centuries. This is
a plant that changed in the seventeenth century and people

(04:19):
started importing indigo, which was a superior source of dye
from India. India is not the only place where indigo grows,
but once it started to catch on in in Europe,
the British started up a number of indigo plantations in India.
This made India the main source of indigo for much
of Europe, and this sort of led to a cycle

(04:41):
of demand and more demand, um they would plant plantations
and demand would increase and they would be more plantations,
and people were really working themselves to the bone on
these indigo plantations. This eventually led to India's Indigo Revolt,
which was an uprising by the farmer against the plantations

(05:01):
and the European owners of the plantations in eighteen fifty
six and eighteen fifty seven. And theingo is still used
extensively today, though especially for dyeing denim for your blue jeans.
So green tones have come from lichen, fungi and especially minerals.
Copper has been a big one here, but cobalt has

(05:22):
also been used to make some shades of green. When
it comes to shades of black, there are all kinds
of very common things that you can use to make
paints and inks out of, including soot, ivory and bones,
but you can't really die things with most of these
because they don't stick to the fabric. For a long time,
there was no true black dye. People in Europe would

(05:44):
mostly make black fabric by dyeing at a series of
other colors, which unless it was sort of a byproduct
of re dyeing the same gown over and over as
it got older. This was just time consuming and expensive. Yeah,
that's even an issue that can tenues today when people
purchase an article of clothing or a piece of fabric
and they want to diet black. Even the commercially available dies,

(06:07):
what you usually get is a very dark purple. It's
very ticky to get a nice saturated black. And that
actually changed this sort of time consuming, really costly approach
to multiple dye layers that they were doing after Europeans
started making their way to the America's and they actually
found a tree that became known as logwood, and the

(06:28):
heartwood of logwood is very very dark, and a true
black dye could be extracted from it. Because the primary
source of logwood was traders from Spain, this guy was
actually banned in England from its introduction there around fifteen
seventy five all the way to sixteen seventy three. Parliament
claimed that logwood produced colors quote of a fugacious character.

(06:51):
The Anglo Spanish War and other tensions between England and
Spain probably had a lot more to do with it
than whether the dye faded quickly. There are also lots
and lots of ways to make white pigments including chalk,
rice and limestone, and as we also talked about in
our makeup episode, lead lead as kind of a multi
purpose component, depending on exactly what it's made with and

(07:15):
how it's prepared. That's really why there's so much lead
based paint around for so many years, so in most
of the world, people have had quite a number of
options for making a vast array of colors, but a
couple of specific guys have turned out to have really,
really rich stories of their own, and we will talk
about those more in just a moment. If Tracy would

(07:36):
like to take a brief pause for a word from
our sponsor, and now we will hop back to the
wonderful world of color. One source of red around the
world has been insects. The cockoneal is a scale insect
that's native to Central and South America. Some people also
pronounce that coconeal, and Europeans got their first glimpse of

(07:58):
it thanks to the conquistor Hernan Cortes in the fifteen hundreds.
The various species of insect used for this dye are
all in the genus Dactylopius, although Cortes as soldiers called
them Cocanelia cultivada. The females live on prickly pear cactuses.
The wind blows them from cactus to cactus when they're

(08:19):
still nymphs, and then as they mature, they attached themselves
to the cacti. The females are harvested from the cacti
and then dried, and then they are crushed and bathed
in acid. And a pound of dye contains about seventy
thousand of these little insects. Some people, in addition to
pronouncing cockneal two different ways, also use coconeal and carmine interchangeably.

(08:43):
Other people sort of differentiate between coconeal and carmine as
two shades of red. Either way, Carmine is also made
from these same bugs. Soon after Europeans were introduced to
these insects, the Habsburgs decided to start up a cocaneal
business and started exporting cockneal back to Spain, and the
cockneal trade then spread all over the world. In the

(09:07):
sixteen hundreds, dyers started figuring out how to modify cockneal
to make all kinds of other shades of red, so
the demand for its skyrocketed. Although occasionally it would dip
a little bit thanks to various economic conditions or perhaps wars.
Entrepreneurs in Europe kept trying to figure out how to
move cockneal production out of the Americas because, in addition

(09:30):
to it being pretty expensive to ship these massive loads
of of insects across the ocean, this was the height
of piracy's golden age, which meant that ships that were
carrying this red dye were always at risk in the
part of the ocean that they needed to cross to
get back to Spain. And although the insects themselves live

(09:53):
in many parts of the world today thanks to very
deliberate efforts to transplant them, actually getting a usable number
of them to grow somewhere else turned out to be
really quite a task. Ship after ship left the America
has loaded down with plants and insects, only for something
you know, unfortunate to befall them along the way. Either
the insects would die or their life cycle would be

(10:15):
interrupted by the travel or a well meaning crew member
would destroy those pesky bugs with salt water. Once the
insects finally did make it to India, which was really
one of one of the places people were hoping they
could take off, it was without a crop of cacti
for them to live on. They wound up surviving on
a similar species that already lived in India. But even so,

(10:38):
the Indian cockneal industry really never managed to supplant the
American one. India was producing four thousand pounds of the
die a year by seventy seven, but pretty much everyone
in Europe thought it was vastly inferior to the die
that was coming from Central and South America. Coconeal is
still used today, and one of those uses is actually food,

(11:01):
which is a little bit chagrinning and disturbing to people
who don't like the idea of eating bugs. Unless you
are allergic to them, there is no health risk in
having them in your food. Yeah. I kind of look
at that as one of those whenever I have a
food revelation about oh, this is actually a gross thing
you've been consuming, I'm like, well, I've consumed it for years, right,

(11:21):
And cocknell is one of the many things that goes
in that category. We also have a few fancy blues
to talk about, and I think blue is your favorite color,
isn't it It is? That's not why we're talking about
more than one fancy blue die. A gyp shap blue
is the oldest man made blue die and the oldest

(11:41):
man made die in general that we know of, As
its name suggests, that got to start in Egypt about
three thousand years ago with the combination of a lime, copper, oxide,
and quartz. And once these were put into a kiln
in the right proportions, they were fired down to a
fine powder that could be made into paint and dies.
And if you are confused, because earlier we said that

(12:04):
ochre was the oldest thing, you can pretty much make
an ochre paint out of straight up ochre and something
to moisten it with. And this was a much more
deliberate combining of multiple ingredients to make a die. Ultramarine
has also been around for a really long time. It
is made from lapis lazuli, which was primarily mined in Afghanistan.
Making ultramarine from lapis lazuli was an intensely manual processed

(12:28):
powdered mineral would have to be repeatedly needed with lie
to ultimately make this die. There's some evidence that the
Chinese had access to ultramarine as early as the eighth century.
B c. There are some very ancient glazed beads that
modern analysis has shown to have been made with ultramarine.
There are also other blue pigments used in the glaze, though,

(12:51):
so it is possible that the ultramarine was accidentally synthesized
thanks to impurities in the kiln. We do know for
sure that by the century CE, deliberately made ultramarine inks
appear in Byzantine manuscripts. It's popularity really took off during
the Middle Ages in Europe, and because so much time, labor,

(13:12):
and travel was involved in its production and distribution, it
was exorbitantly expensive. This is one of the reasons it
was used with very particular significance and religious artwork. The
Virgin Mary often wears ultramarine blue clothing in medieval art,
and the cost and expense is also why the French
Society for the Encouragement of National Industry announced a prize

(13:35):
for whoever could make a cost effective synthetic ultramarine in
eighteen twenty four. And cost effective here meant less than
three hundred francs per kilogram. I got into some drama
about who eventually claimed that prize because there were too
two people who independently of one another, came up with

(13:56):
the same basic process for synthetic ultramarine, and then is
often the case, artists didn't want to use the synthetic
synthetic one because they thought it wasn't as good as
the real one. Hellett is a blue dye that's very
important in the Jewish tradition. It was traditionally used to
tie blue threads used in the tassels that are in

(14:18):
the corners of prayer shawls. This color comes from the
glands of a snail, most likely Helplex trunkulus, and at
first the color that the snails secretions produces kind of
a brownish yellow. But if you soak cotton in a
vat of it see sort of that dye this cotton,
and then let it air dry in the sun, it

(14:40):
turns blue. Talent is mentioned repeatedly in the Torah, and
often in the same context as precious materials like gold
and silk. The dye was so religiously important that the
methods for making it were a very closely guarded secret.
This unfortunately meant that the knowledge of how to produce
it was lost around the seventh century, as Islamic people's

(15:01):
moved into the Eastern Mediterranean. Modern scholars have managed to
recreate how to produce this color, but there's still some
debate about whether it's exactly the same as the ancient
hue described in these texts. And before we talk about
another dye that was definitely made from snails, where will
take a brief break to talk about a word from sponsor,

(15:22):
And now we will get back to some of those
colors that have particularly interesting and longer stories. So we've
already talked about some totally cost effective, widely available ways
to make purple. But in the Roman Empire, people got
a little weird about purple, and one color purple in particular,

(15:43):
as with tell it Tyrene, purple came from sea snails,
specifically balinist brand Daris, previously known as Murix Brandaris, and
this dye was primarily made in the city of Tire
in what is now Lebanon. Its height of popularity was
during the time of the Roman Empire, and it's mentioned
at least fifty times in the Christian Bible. When it's living,

(16:06):
this snail secretes a slightly toxic mucus that's part of
how it kills its prey, and if you crack open
its shell. You can puncture the mucus gland and get
out a drop of that mucus. When this drop of
mucus is exposed to light, it progresses through several colors
on the blue green end of the spectrum before winding

(16:26):
up purple. It took twelve thousand snails to make enough
die to die one Roman Toga. Consequently, an enormous hill
of discarded shells formed outside the city of Tire and
today this hill has actually become usable land. It's home
to houses, businesses, there's a cemetery there and it's actually

(16:46):
known as Murex Hill. There are still broken snail shells
all around its base. That astounding twelve thousand snails number
is why purple dye, especially Tyreheanne purple die, was so
expensive and associated only with the very rich. But by
the year four hundred, it's popularity had also made these

(17:08):
snails pretty hard to find, so it became illegal for
anyone who wasn't actually part of the royal family to
wear tyree and purple because it was just too scarce.
And you know, the royal royalty didn't want to lose
their purple that they were so fond of. Both both
emperors Nero and Theo ds Is. The second considered the

(17:29):
wearing of tyree and purple by Nod royalty to be
punishable by death. Following the end of the Roman Empire,
the color fell out of favor and people went back
to the old standbys of indigo. And like him, this
is one of those situations where you kind of look
at what it took to make this purple, and the
fact that you could make purple other waves. It was

(17:51):
really it's not like that was the only purple that existed.
It was just the only one that was so rare
that people got a little strange about how they they
were emotionally invested in it. Yeah, color status becomes a
whole sociological studiable thing at that point. So eventually people

(18:13):
figured out how to make synthetic dies. William Henry Perkin
was an English chemist. He was actually trying to synthesize quinine,
which we've talked about before. It's used to treat malaria
in eighteen fifty six, and he stumbled across something else entirely,
which was mauve die, and he was making the substance
and it was kind of black and gross looking, and
then he realized as he looked at it that it

(18:35):
was actually kind of a pretty color in spaces in
different spaces. Um this came to be known as analygine
purple and as mauvine, and it was the first truly
synthetic die. Perkin then used his newly discovered chemical process
to set up his own die factory, and once Queen
Victoria wore a move dressed to her daughter's wedding, which
was in eighteen fifty eight, Europe was almost instantly caught

(18:58):
up in mauve madness. Perkin then turned his eye to
all kinds of other colors, and he ended up becoming very,
very rich, but he gave most of his profits away
to charity. This didn't instantly put an end to natural dies.
There are still plenty of natural dies being used even today.
Many artists and artisans really resisted the idea of using

(19:19):
synthetic colors, and at first aniline was also very expensive.
But the availability of synthetic dies did really change the
playing field significantly when it came to color. You know
why I spend so much time and effort farming cockneal
If you can just make it pretty synthetic red, that's
basically the same shade, and today colors have lost some

(19:40):
of the connotations that they carried in earlier parts of history,
especially in the industrialized world. It's pretty common knowledge that
in many parts of the world, blue and purple were
the colors of royalty. But today you can get a
blue sweater for the same price as a brown sweater.
You don't have to pay extra for a royal purple crayon.
And today people might use the colors she wear to
judge your personality or your sense of taste, but in

(20:03):
places where synthetic dies are readily available, that doesn't actually
extend to your actual social class or net worth. Colors
are democratized. Anybody can have them. Yeah, and I read
a really interesting paper that was about Yeah, people pretty
much now will judge your color literacy, like whether they
think the combination of colors you're wearing our tacky or

(20:25):
too showy or something like that. Um, but that doesn't
actually translate to how much those colors cost or what
your actual social status is. Yes, it'll be uh, you know,
to borrow from Project Runway. Your taste level that's discussed,
not so much your social standing. Right. I also have

(20:47):
an interesting piece of listener mail. This is This is
from David, and it's one of those messages where someone
asks the question that I actually found the answer to
while I was researching the podcast, but it didn't make
it into the episode because I didn't want to derail
USTs down a rabbit hole of sidetrack. So this is
from David, who says, dear Tracy and Holly, and your

(21:09):
podcast about the Battle of Moments, you discuss the vision
of angels coming to the rescue of the British troops
led by a saint. I'm not well versed in mythology
or history, so I wonder if it's actually the first
instance of this type of story. In Robert Jordan's fantasy epic,
The Horn of Valier is used to call upon the
Heroes of the Horn, a group of deceased legendary warriors

(21:32):
led by a great general arter Hawkwing, to assist the
protagonists of the story to prevail in the final battle.
It was always my assumption that Robert Jordan, trained in
military history at the Citadel, was borrowing from mythology for
this and other elements of his story, But now I
wonder if it was borrowed from the story of Battle
of Mons. Is it possible that General John char terrorists

(21:53):
who you characterized as a propagandist and who would also
be trained in military history, may have borrowed this either
from earlier military legend or from mythology. Mythology can be
a powerful tool for rallying troops, something that even corporations
are well aware of and used to motivate workers without
landish or heroic stories of their founders e g. Steve Jobs.

(22:17):
Are you aware of any mythological basis for this supposed event,
cheers David. So. First, Uh, what this actually reminded me
of when I was working on it was the oath
Breakers um, also known as the dead Men of dun
Harrow in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Uh. Similarly,
some deceased troops who are going to come back and

(22:38):
fight and save the day, uh for the protagonists. And
there is definitely a folkloric precedent for stories of some
kind of supernatural or divine intervention coming to help people
in the battlefield. It's pretty clear in this particular story, UM,
that the that the story the Bowman was the ultimate

(23:00):
source for something and that UM that John shar Terras's
propaganda work was kind of building up that story that
people were already passing around. But I read a really
interesting article in the journal Folklore from two thousand and
two by a man named David Clark which went into
the whole history of wartime stories about supernatural interventions that

(23:27):
changed the course of a battle. Uh, And so I'm
just gonna read a little bit of it. Similar stories
can be found in the folklore and the mythology of
many nations. These include the vision of the Holy Cross
to the Emperor Constantine before the Battle of Millivan Bridge,
and the legends of King Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa, who
were said to lie sleeping in caves waiting for the

(23:48):
call to defend their country in a future conflict. In
the case of the visions of Moms, an interesting avenue
of investigation relates to the substitution within popular belief of
King Arthur with St. George as identity of the figure
on horseback who scatters the German cavalry. The source of
this motif can be found in match of the story
where the soldier recalls the invocation to St. George printed

(24:10):
upon plates in a vegetarian restaurant. Furthermore, Arthur Matchin's writings
were directly influenced by the patriotic and martial traditions drawn
from the mythology of Britain. UM. He then goes goes
on to talk about some other uh folkloric stories about St.
George appearing to troops at different battles UM, starting as

(24:33):
far back as the fourth century. So yes, while there's
definitely historical precedent of uh, you know, folk tales and
legends of supernatural troops coming to help in a battle, UM,
in this particular case, it's pretty clear that it was
a short work of fiction that inspired the whole thing.

(24:54):
So thank you very much David for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us, we were
at History Podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're also
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you would like to learn a little more about what
we have talked about today, you can come to our

(25:16):
parent website, which is how stuff Works dot com, and
you can put colors into the search bar you will
find an article that is called why do you boys
wear blue and girls wear paint? I think it's actually
girls wear pink and boys wear blue, but it gets
into the story of how we got into this gendered
situation of what colors are okay for boys and girls
in American culture. You can also come to our website

(25:38):
which is missed in History dot com, and you can
find show notes and all of the episodes and lots
of other cool stuff. You can do all of that
and a whole lot more at how stuff Works dot
and missed in History dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, how stuff Works dot Com.

(26:01):
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